Today My Blog Turns 21

So charge your glasses and raise a toast to a better future.

As always, the tip jar and comment section are open.

Let Burning Lifeboats Light the Way to a Better Tomorrow

Professional Left Podcast Episode 959: The 16th Anniversary Show

"All cruelty springs from weakness." --  Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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It Was 20 Years Ago Today...

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- William Faulkner

In keeping with the tenor of our times, I'm not going to apologize in advance for what I am about to do. 

Apologies are so 2012.

Instead I'm going to focus on how perilous this post is about to become.  

Will it be as dangerous as the Triple Lindy?

Possibly.  Because today I'm going to try the rare 20th Anniversary Fundraiser Double Post, and feat which has driven men mad in the attempt.  Others have had to be hospitalized with severe leg cramps and loss of object permanence.  

But for you good people, I'mma give it a go.

First, some business.  This is part of my 20th blogiversary thing, so here's the tip jar if you feel so inclined.  

Burn The Lifeboats

With that out of the way, next up is this bit of prose.  If you're so inclined, let me know what you think of it down in the comments:

Every few years some new, soulless, ambitious goon clambers out of the moral sewer of the Party of Personal Responsibility to seize control of the vocabulary of Hate Radio and appoint himself the party's Demagogue-in-Chief for the moment, harvesting the ever-ripe-and-ready paranoia and rage of the GOP base and dragging us all a little further down the road the Hell.

Checks a lot of boxes, doesn't it?  The depravity of a party that just keeps spawning monsters.  Hate Radio vocab being the Mother Tongue of the party base.  The party's lust for an authorization strong man who would harvest the preexisting rage and paranoia the Republican voters.   

Pretty standard stuff these days, right?  Nothing you wouldn't hear on any given day in 2025 from any MSNBC Never Trumper, or in any essay at The Bulwark, or on any Lincoln Project podcast.  

Bold.  Edgy.  Truth-Telling.

Except its not from 2025.  And it's not from an MSNBC Never Trumper, or a Bulwark, or a Lincoln Project podcast.    In fact, it's from 2013.  That's two years before Trump even existed in the Republican firmament.  And it's from me.  And I can tell you that, back in 2013, such talk was not greeted as Bold, Edgy, Truth-Telling back by all those Republicans would later respawn and re-emerge as MSNBC Never Trumpers and Bulwark publishers and Lincoln Project advertising moguls. 

In fact, such talk was mockingly dismissed by such people as ... 

Liberal. Crackpot. Alarmism.  

In fact, many of those same people have blamed people like me for conjuring Trump into existence So you can maybe kinda see why actual Liberal voices are not welcome on the largest Liberal and/or Resistance media platforms.  Because we remember all the inconvenient things which those platforms are designed to erase of the memory of man.    

Back in 2013, the Republican thug de jure was a fella named Ted Cruz, and while he had been a darling of the moutbreathers and Khaki Klansmen who make up the base of the GOP, his doomed strategy of trying to filibuster and shutdown Barack Obama and Democrats into defunding Obama's signature health care reform flopped hard.  And almost overnight Republicans who had sworn fealty to Canadian-born Zodiac killer prime suspect, Raphael Edward Cruz began to bail:

Again, from 2013:

Now that Republicanism Personified Ted Cruz is starting to rot from the amygdala down, members of the still-batshit-crazy-but-not-quite-that-batshit-crazy sub-genus of the Stupid/Crazy Party are stumbling over each other to score their "I've Been Against Ted Cruz Since..." Red Badges of Political Courage.  For example, here is what confidence trickster Peter King -- a man who was perfectly happy tossing gobbets of red meat to the teabagger crocodile until it turned on him -- now has to say about his competition for the hearts and wallets of the rubes:

“I took a chance when Ted Cruz was the darling of the Republicans,” King added. “It was only two weeks ago, but he was the darling of Republicans. I was the only guy taking him on nationwide.” 

Brave, Brave, Brave, Brave Sir Robin...

But, as I warned back in 2013...

Of course, Cruz and King and all the rest of the Koch brothers' hired help are not the problems: they are merely the latest and most stomach-churning surface manifestations of the long, deep, Conservative rot that has been eating at the heart of the United States for generations:

...

Unfortunately, the calamity of a potential default has tempered neither judgment nor passion. On Saturday, Ted Cruz—the man who lit the match, won the Values Voters Straw Poll with 42 percent of the vote. Channeling her inner Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) concluded that the President “committed impeachable offenses.” Bachmann also proclaimed that civil disobedience was a potential response to Obama’s “thuggery,” and compared the Obama presidency to Egypt’s deposed Muslim Brotherhood...

Yep.  Still more stuff which all of your favorite Never Trump teevee and podcasting celebrities dismissed at the time Liberal. Crackpot. Alarmism.  

In fact, you'll never guess what former Bulwark employee and frequent Bulwark returning guest Amanda Carpenter was doing for a living back in 2013 as I was writing this.  From Wikipedia:

In January 2013, Carpenter became senior communications advisor and speechwriter for Senator Ted Cruz

Wowsers.  

But hang on, because here comes the second part of the extremely difficult 20th Anniversary Fundraiser Double Post.  

Because that 2013 post warning about the rise of Republican demagogues and how Cruz very publicly screwing the pooch it was making life difficult (with the emphasis on "cult") for Republican quislings and collaborators who had gone along with Cruz, in turn referred back to a post I had written during my very first few days as a blogger.  

Back to April 1, 2005, to a post that had originated as a comment over at the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog as I believe was the impetus for Steve kicking me out and insisting that I start a blog of my own.  

Which, clearly, I did.  

From me, 20 years ago, back when the Republican thug de jure was a fella named Tom Delay:

Rep. DeLay Preps the Beds for the GOP's Big Sleep

(This particular bit started life as a comment in Gilliard's Shoppe but has been Repurposed to better serve You, The Customer :-)

The little-“p” politics of this is fascinating.  [The fact that] Over the long run that the GOP is demographically/electorally doomed to become the minority Thurston Howell Party again. Either when the Fundy Shining Path Rebels that make up their margin of victory make one too many batshit demands, or are are told “No” once too often.

(If you want to get a clear picture of how this will look, rent “Fatal Attraction” or “Play Misty For Me”. I’m not going to be ignored, George!)

So either they take their bat and ball and stomp disgustedly back to Mordor, or a handful of moderate Republicans get so freaked out by the Randall Terry Wing of the Party that they bolt or stay home.

But short run…Tom DeLay is now a Household Name. Been waiting 10 years for that to happen and always amazed that Republicans had no fucking clue who he was, even though you’d tell them five or a hundred times. Sheesh. All RAM and no Hard Drive with some people.

Every GOP Leader knows the Gingrich Lesson: No matter how much the membership owes you, they’ll go absolutely Lord of The Flies on your Piggy-ass the minute you becomes a measurable liability. Newt was so completely “I Am The Reich” that he would have been perfectly happy to go into the bunker and fight it out until the GOP was razed to rubble had he not been stopped by his own House Republicans.

And since the Suddenly Huge Liability named Tom DeLay is now just “Tell Tale Heart”--thundering away under the GOP floorboards, threatening to drown out everything else, the question is, will that same dynamic play twice?

Well DeLay ain’t Gingrich. He learned from that episode, and they don’t call him The Hammer for his shipwright skills. He spent a decade forcibly collecting GOP testicles and caching them in his private Crown Royal bag. At the slightest provocation he will to politically and personally destroy anyone who doesn’t bend a deep knee to His Gorgon Awfulness.

And both the Texas and National Republican parties have shown absolutely craven willingness to rewrite the Rules on the fly any time the Beast’s wet-bar needed to be restocked with virgin’s blood, or whenever a law or policy might make threaten to cinch-in the bottomless lust he and his stooges have for Power, Money, Trinkets and Perks, even a trifle.

So (hahah!) they’ve kinda disarmed themselves to accommodate him, and now they’re stuck very much up on that very windy gibbet with him. So if you were running in 2006 and playing How Do I Save My Pink Republican Skin while DeLay is holding your ass held hostage, what do you do?

Got to time it juuuust right. Jump away from Herr DeLay too soon and he’ll blow your head off. Jump too late, and your face will be morphed into Tom DeLay…into Randall Terry…into, I dunno, Osama Bin Laden? in every ad, every day, for the entire election cycle.

My simple suggestion for voters in 2006?

Shoot the hostage ;-)

I concluded my 2013 Ted Cruz post with this:

For the record, to my knowledge not a single Conservative politician, professional Both Sider or mainstream media creature who has ever even briefly awakened to the fact that the GOP is run by monsters has ever acknowledged that the Left was right all along.

And damn if it this isn't still 100% true.

Finally, a sincere "thank you"  for your readership, support and (mostly) kind words lo' these many years.

And if you missed the tip jar at the entrance, for your So convenience the staff has helpfully placed one nearby which you can see as you exit through the gift shop.  Sorta like ATMs at casinos: :-)

Write if you get work,

Your pal, 

driftglass

I Am The Liberal Media

Monster See, Monster Do

This weekend is my 20th blogging anniversary, so I'm putting the tip jar right up-top should any of you feel inclined.

Burn The Lifeboats

Hurricane Katrina wasn’t enough.  

Terri Schiavo wasn’t enough.  

Torture revelations were definitely not enough.  Hell, scum like Hannity and Limbaugh celebrated it, and torture architect John Yoo is now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Even Iraq falling apart in a welter of lies, corruption and incompetence probably wasn’t enough.  

It took all of that plus the collapse of the world economy under MBA president George W. Bush to finally break the brains of the Republican base. Because, finally there was no place left for them to hide.  Finally, there it was, right in front of them, every day: the irrefutable proof that everything they believed was bullshit, and everyone they had trusted had lied to them because they’re such gullible chumps.  

And right then, in that awful revelation, they could have had a moment of clarity.  

They could have repented.  They could have atoned.  At the very least they could have done the grown-up thing and apologized to those of us who tried to warn them, and whom they had spat upon and called traitors.

They could have tried to figure out where they had been led astray.  

But they didn’t do any of that, because a Republican would rather die a thousand painful deaths than ever admit they had been wrong, and that we America-hating, terrorist loving Libtards had been right.

Instead, as I wrote 16 years ago, all the way back in 2009, like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

 

Instead of changing their ways and waking the fuck up, they got themselves some stupid hats and little flags, stepped through the Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine, and voila!  Just like *that* they were no longer Republicans.

No siree!  Now they were  the Tea Party!  Independents!   Independent Constitutional Conservative Originalists.  Or whatever.   And instead of learning from the catastrophe they had created, they threw themselves into the arms of any crackpot who would tell them that none of this had been their fault.  And that everyone should just forget the entire Bush administration anyway, because this new scary black guy named Obama was a million times worse than any president ever.  

So they embraced still-living sleazy con men like Glenn Beck:

And the very-dead sleazy con man Andrew Breitbart, speaking here at CPAC in 2012:

And, of course, they fell madly in love with the snarling, racist King of the Birthers:

So deeply in love with him that they nominated him for president and put him on the debate stage next to Hillary Clinton:

If you watched those debates you know that Hillary Clinton absolutely wiped the floor with him, but you also know that it absolutely didn’t matter, because during the Clinton years and the Dubya years and the Obama years, the Republican base had learned the most important lesson of all.  They learned that if they all locked arms and screamed loud enough through their Hate Radio and Fox News megaphones, they could make a craven legacy media drunk on Both Siderism go along with them in pretending the Bush administration sorta kinda never happened, and that Republican base voters weren’t really responsible for anything they said and did, and that the Republican lies about Obama being churned out a mile a minute by Fox News and Hate Radio were all legitimate news stories, and that lockstep Republican congressional obstruction and sabotage were actually Obama’s fault.

And that is the power of lying en masse.  

And an ignorant, racist mob that demands to be lied draws con men, grifters and demagogues like shit draws flies.  

And the King of Shit Mountain is now the president of the United States.  

Again.  

So now we have a genuine scandal that ticks every box of every issue Republicans were swearing five minutes ago that they cared about.  National security.  Handling classified material.  Transparency.  Competence.  Freedom of speech. And the reaction from MAGA-land has been uniform and entirely predictable.

From MAGA Twitter, this is a small representative sample from the literally thousands of nearly identical reactions:

Karoline Leavitt, the actual White House Press Secretary:  The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT “war plans.” This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.

This was followed by some mope named CECE who got hundreds of enthusiastic responses:   Why isn’t anyone calling out Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic for not announcing himself when he landed on a private Signal call he wasn’t meant to join? Journalistic ethics demand transparency, but he stayed quiet, copied the texts, and published them, to the world all to make the Trump administration look bad.  Where’s the outrage over a reporter exploiting it for a hit piece?  The focus stays on the mistake, not his ethical lapse. Why? 

Katagaruma: He should be hauled in for questioning and his devices seized for analysis. 

Gary D:   Was it just a set up to create a MEDIA fire storm? Asking for a friend. 

SweetPeaBelle: He is unethical and out for the BIG story.

Janet1489534061: It was Planned  

realredsd: He should be facing punishment.

EJGSH: They were counting on him being a piece of garbage. 

jnottah  He's a Radical douchebag and The Atlantic is a PROPAGANDA RAG .

HJ4719125173895:  Maybe he is a spy guilty of treason ! 

SSgt Mark USMC:   I really think he should be charged with sedition or espionage. He knew he was going to be on that. He did unexpectedly land on it. It was arranged. We need to find who arranged it. Charge them for treason and charge him for sedition. 

They're all speaking the same language.  They're all goose-stepping in the same direction.  Deny.  Deny.  Deny.  Except at this point the base doesn’t know which lie to tell, and Conservative media hasn’t reached a consensus on which lie to tell them to tell, so they're putting out a buffet table of a dozen different, contradictory lies and letting the base play Choose Your Own Lying Adventure until they figure out which one(s) works best.  

From Axios:  

The MAGA media ecosystem "has splintered into a series of competing theories to try to explain away the scandal." 

But at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter which lie or lies they settle on, as long as it accomplishes two objectives:   First, their Dear Leader and his people must be blameless, and second, somehow, some Liberal somewhere is pulling the strings.  

However I can tell you this.  I did not have “Quoting Friedrich Hegel” on my bingo card as part of this mad scramble for the perfect lie, but guess what?  It has happened.  

But for that story I have to back up just a bit and check in to see how poor ‘ol Jeff Bezos is doing with that little newsletter of his.   And right off the bat we find that three headlines at three different media outlets are all telling the same story.  

From Fox News :

Trump claims Bezos fretted to him about 'out of control' people at Washington Post

President Donald Trump said in a new interview he was optimistic about his working relationship with Jeff Bezos as well as the future of the Washington Post, claiming Bezos had even disparaged the newspaper's staffers to him.

"They actually did a couple of bad articles on him (Bezos)," Trump said in an interview with OutKick's Clay Travis. "He said, 'This is crazy, I lose my fortune running this thing and they (Post newsroom employees), you know, they're out of control.' These people are crazy. They're crazy people. They're out of control."  

From The Hill : 

Trump: Bezos a ‘good guy,’ trying to be ‘more fair’ with Washington Post coverage.

“I think it’s great,” Trump told conservative commentator Clay Travis of Outkick during an interview aboard Air Force One over the weekend. “At length, I talked to him about it. He’s a good guy. I didn’t really know him in the first term. I mean, it’s such a difference between now and the first time.” 

And from the New York Post :  

Trump claims Jeff Bezos complained to him about ‘out of control’ Washington Post staffers: ‘They’re crazy people’

“They actually did a couple of bad articles on him (Bezos),” Trump said in an interview with OutKick’s Clay Travis. 

All three headline stories, but none of those media outlets did the original reporting.  They’re all citing the same source:  Trump talking to Clay Travis of Outkick during an interview aboard Air Force One

So let’s go there.  

This is the OutKick blurb at OutKick:

Clay Travis is the founder of the fastest growing national multimedia platform, OutKick, that produces and distributes engaging content across sports and pop culture to millions of fans across the country. OutKick was created by Travis in 2011 and sold to the Fox Corporation in 2021. One of the most electrifying and outspoken personalities in the industry, Travis hosts OutKick The Show where he provides his unfiltered opinion on the most compelling headlines throughout sports, culture, and politics. He also makes regular appearances on FOX News Media as a contributor providing analysis on a variety of subjects ranging from sports news to the cultural landscape.

And here’s more about them.  

He and Buck Sexton host The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, a three-hour weekday conservative talk show which debuted on June 21, 2021 as the replacement of The Rush Limbaugh Show on many radio stations. 

Ah!  Ideological continuity!  So important in keeping the reprogrammable meatbags from getting all confused and cranky.

And sure enough, for decades, from 11AM - 2 PM every day, you could find Rush Limbaugh or one of his lackeys on local radio station WMAY right here in Springfield, Illinois.  But Limbaugh is dead now.  Dead and buried in what I believe may have become the largest impromptu public urinal in St. Louis, Missouri.  

So now, where once you would find Limbaugh, you can listen to the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show right here in Springfield, Illinois on WMAY.  And on any of hundreds of other radio stations across the country, because the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show is part of a national syndication package, so that hundreds of thousands of Republican base voters are all hearing the same message at the same time.

As part of that syndication package, Before them on WMAY, from 9 AM to 11 AM,  you’ll find Fox News' very own Brian Kilmeade.

After them, from 2 - 4 PM, comes The Dana Show.  That's Dana Loesch.  And after her, for three more hours, The Erick Erickson Show.

But wait!  There's more!  

Within the OutKick platform you'll find the OutKick Show with Clay Travis.  No surprise.  But you'll also find 13 other shows.  There are gambling tips.  Sports news.  Politics and culture with Tomi Lahren!  

Dan Dakich has a show called "Don't @ Me" and he is billed as "an American basketball sportscaster. He is a former player, assistant coach, interim head coach for the Indiana University Hoosiers 

American basketball player".  But here he was on Twitter yesterday. "NPR's Katherine Maher admits outlet failed to cover Hunter Biden laptop"

Then there's the Ricky Cobb show.  Here's that blurb:  "Ricky Cobb show will offer fans that magical blend of insight and humor into current sports topics along with his deep passion for sports, culture and humor from the 70’s and 80’s."  Recent topics were, let's see, "Tesla terrorists attempt to go mainstream,” and "Tim Walz Fans The Tesla and Elon Hate", "DEI officially done at Disney, are there any masculine Democrats?" 

There's Gaines for Girls With Riley Gaines.  From the blurb:  "Riley Gaines has emerged as one of the most powerful voices in the fight to save women's sports and spaces, but the fight is far from over!"

Three episodes from last year:  "She Was FAILED For Using 'Biological Woman", "Protecting the integrity of women's sports with Tommy Tuberville" and "Josh Hawley Confronts NCAA About Trans Athletes In Women's Sports"

FOX59 Sports anchor/reporter Charly Arnolt now has her own show.  Recent episodes include  "DOGE Superstar", "Have Any Woke Companies Actually Bounced Back?". "The Woke Push To Keep Men In Women’s Sports". "Canadian Sports Fans Continue To Boo The US National Anthem!", "Can Men In Women's Sports Have Enough Impact To Flip Democrats"

The latest episode of Hot Mic w/ Hutton & Withrow is "No Woke Basketball"

Fox News' Tyrus has his own place there.  Recent episode asks "Can Wrestling SAVE America From DIVISIVE Politics?!"

Then there is the Will Cain Show.  That's Fox News' Will Cain.

Are you noticing the pattern here yet? 

The lead sentence coming out of Will Cain's mouth on his show yesterday was literally, "Why are women so woke?"  

After that it was on to the "so called" war plans with lots of scowling and air quotes around everything.  Then he brought on some obscure visiting professor named Gad Saad from Northwood University who blathered on about two French philosophers who wrote books about how human reasoning didn't evolve to find the truth, but just to win arguments.  And that somehow proves that Jeffrey Goldberg clearly wrote his Atlantic article just to hurt Republicans.  

Gad Saad:

"He's not a true journalist.  He's not pursuing objective truth.  He simply wants his team to win an argument by making the other team look bad.”

For the record, Northwood University is "a private university focused on business education".  Its most popular undergraduate majors according to 2021 records were things like Business Administration and Management, Marketing/Marketing Management, Vehicle & Vehicle Parts & Accessories Marketing Operations and Sport & Fitness Administration/Management, so I have no idea what a visiting philosophy professor has to do there, except that whatever he does leaves him with enough spare time show up on The Will Cain Show when summoned.

Late breaking news from Gad Saad on Twitter -- 11:40 AM · Mar 27, 2025 "My appearance tonight on Jesse Watters is going to be rescheduled to another date."

Oh.  He's that guy!

And then we're off to, as promised and no kidding, Hegelianism.  You know, sweeping, big-word musings on what even is knowledge?  How can anyone really know anything?  All of which amounted to nothing but a job-lot of big smarty pants words from a Real Philosopher to reassure the MAGA meatheads that they’re really the smart ones and the Signal scandal is really some kinda Liberal plot against the Dear Leader.

For the record, today’s top essays at OutKick are

Some Environmentalists Could Give A Rip About The Environment by Tomi Lahren

Trump Pokes Fun At Reporter For Still Wearing A Mask by Ian Miller

Yes, Red State Voters Helped Tank 'Snow White' Box Office by Ian Miller

And do you know who advertises on OutKick?  Everybody.  In fact, I might have missed the crucial 99th Lifetime teevee episode, about Gypsy Rose, Life After Lockup if I hadn't been tooling around over there.  And this was Season 2, Episode 99:  The Unseen Footage!!!

This is the universe in which MAGA Republicans live all day, every day now.  It’s safe there.  Reassuring.  And the bargain they’ve made with their media is their eternal financial and electoral loyalty in exchange for protecting them from ever feeling stupid or wrong.  And for that reason, those people are now permanently lost to reason and unreachable, and it is a waste of time and energy to continue to try. 

From Greg Sargent at The New Republic: 

In Signalgate, Trumpworld is demonstrating exactly what's wrong with authoritarian populism: Refusal to admit error, walling out of constructive criticism and the cult-like defense of the leader at all costs.  

And it is a very profitable business.  Which is why, just down the street, yet another for-profit MAGA propaganda shop is opening for business, with some depressingly familiar faces.

From The Hollywood Reporter:  

Former Fox News primetime star Megyn Kelly says that she is launching MK Media, a video and audio podcast network that will work with creators and journalists in the news and entertainment space. The first three shows will be hosted by journalist and 2Way founder Mark Halperin, Daily Mail culture columnist Maureen Callahan, and influencer and political commentator Link Lauren, and others will follow.

Media Matters has the larger picture:

The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces

A new Media Matters analysis found 9 out of the 10 top online shows assessed are right-leaning,

...This analysis was based on 320 online shows with a right-leaning or left-leaning ideological bent. We found that right-leaning online shows dominate the ecosystem, with substantially larger audiences on both politics/news shows and supposedly nonpolitical shows that we determined often platformed ideological content or guests.  

And it works.  From CNN:

The biggest scandal of Trump 2.0 is no scandal at all on MAGA media 

So, as legacy media is slowly dying, and the Conservative media ecosystem continues to expand exponentially, the Liberal media, such as it is, is stuck where blogging was in 2007.  

Back then, blogging was exciting and vital; some of us are still at it.  In fact, this Monday will be my 20th anniversary of blogging, which is part of the reason I have the tip jar out at the top this time.  But back in 2007,  just as we seemed to be coming together, a number of A-List bloggers decided that the internet was full.  That there wasn’t room for all of us noobs, and if you hadn’t started blogging in 2003 and weren’t part of their crew, you should just give up and do something else.  

And since blog traffic was the lifeblood of blogging (and later revenue), this was also right around the time of the infamous Blogroll Amnesty Day!  That day when, a handful of A-List Liberal bloggers finally got tired of us smelly little lesser blogging monkeys amongst whom they had been trapped.  So they purged their blogrolls of anyone who wasn’t them, and made sure that they only linked to each other and drove traffic among themselves.

And now, as we look at the podcast world that we’ve been a part of for more than 15 years, it sure looks like that’s what’s happening with what’s left of Liberal media.  Increasingly the Centrist/Center-Right Bulwark that has grown thanks to MSNBC relentless sponsorship, and the Centrist/Center-Left Pod Save crew who made it big on the strength of their inside contacts with Barack Obama and Democratic leadership, are only talking to themselves and each other.  

The Signal Scandal (or Whiskey-Leaks as some wags have called it) may be so bad and have such sprawling implications that the one-third of the country that is completely oblivious to politics might actually hear about it as it is spread by word-of-mouth.

Of course, no one is going to go to jail for this, and given the wall-to-wall corruption and incompetence of the Republican-controlled government, it's likely there will be no serious investigations, which is a tragedy.

But just imagine if we had a Liberal media anywhere near the size, scope and level of message discipline as the Right has. 

Imagine if we had the depth and reach to compel the legacy media to make this the story for months on-end.  To compel them to go after this actual scandal like a dog worrying a bone, just like the Right intimidated the legacy media into pounding non-scandals like "Her emails..." and Benghazi and Whitewater and on and on and on into the ground

Hey Nineteen

OMG, my little blog is all grown up!

Yes, this is my blogiversary.  Actually it was yesterday, but since yesterday was officially "Wingnut Mouthbreathers and Bigots Get Bent Outta Shape Over Trans Day of Visibility" I thought I wait a day.  

Anyway, are a few snips from a thing I wrote and published 19 years ago today.  

The date was April 1.

The year was 2005.

And as an exercise for the class, see if this doesn't sound a whole lot like the political party which would -- to the stunned, bug-eyed disbelief  of all the recently-former Republicans who have since colonized cable teevee -- nominate and elect Donald Trump to the White House:

Now a credulous four-year-old or an average GOP voter might find this persuasive – like missing cookies and milk on Christmas Day “proves” Santa Claus was taking his Elf Union Authorized 15-minute break in your living room – but what about what Paul Harvey used to call, “The rest of the story?”...

This sort idiocy rests at the bewildering heart of the Hard Right.

Why is the Hard Right always so predictably, drooling eager to believe such a torrent of half-assed nonsense, half-truths or outright lies? Why they are so invincibly incapable of even a moment’s reflections on the faint possibility that they might be wrong?

Why they are so willing to believe any ragged, crazy shit that is pulled out of Limbaugh's or DeLay's or Coulter's nether-regions like The Amazing Fecal-o producing mile after mile of shit-stained handkerchiefs out of thin air?

The answer is Fundamentalism: the belief that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God. To believe that One Big Lie that undergirds an entire cult movement that, in turn, owns and operates the Republican Party, you must be willing to trade your soul and free will for faux certainty. You must declare yourself openly and eternally at war with Science, Fact and Truth and once you travel down that road, you are lost. Well and truly fucked.

Then again, without the slack-jawed credulity of the Big Dumb Right, endlessly emptying their change-purses into the coffers of Solar-Corona-Haired Poltroons and getting their mental health treatments by the Laying of Hands on the teevee and praying extra special hard during Jack Van Impe...

... the market for Petroleum-Based Jesus Trinkets, Virgin Mary Douche (For that Immaculately Fresh Feeling) and Velvet Artwork would surely crash...

...hucksters and whores by the thousand would be driven from their Mega Churches and 700 Club sofas and Congressional Seats into cardboard boxes under bridges, begging for scraps. Reduced to turning Two Dollar Indulgence Tricks on the street-corners. Leaning into open car windows at three in the morning, hawking their shabby wares: “Hey Baby! Wanna do some Forgiveness?”...

This is why Liberals cannot be allowed anywhere near the Beltway Media's adult table.  We are the glitch in their matrix.  We are the inexplicable anomaly that makes their whole "No one coulda seen this coming" fairy tale go *poof*.

Because we did see it coming.

And we said what we saw out loud and in public.  And in doing do, in defiance of the dogmas of the Lords and Ladies of the Beltway media and Conservative media, we pretty much killed any possibility of a career as professional opinion-havers.

But the fact remains, we amateurs and autodidacts were right.  And the professionals were wrong.  Horribly, catastrophically wrong.  And they went right on being horribly, catastrophically and confidently wrong until it was far, far too late.  

And that, brothers and sisters, is why they still loathe us and will not abide us being anywhere near them in any public forum.

 

Yes, The Blogiversary Fundraiser Tip Jar Looks Just Like 

The Every Other Day Tip Jar

Last Friday Was My 18th Blogiversary

That's 18 years, 11,000 posts, around 4,000 original graphics and in that entire time only seven typos :-)

And lemme tell ya, over the last 18 years I have seen some shit.

This is a post mine from April 1st, 2005.  The only substantive differences between then and now are:

1. The bigoted,deranged GOP base now runs the party directly and not by proxy. And, 
2. The people who made a living lying about the bigotry and derangement of the GOP base in 2005 now make a living pretending to be utterly shocked that the GOP base suddenly and inexplicably turned into a mob of bigots and imbeciles in 2016.

Swap around a few names and it's the sort of thing Liberals could have (and did) write on any given day over the past couple of decades.   A sin for which we were declared "pariah" and exiled forever into the outer media darkness forever.

Or it's something the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark could've (and did) file the serial numbers off of and post to wild acclaim and a fistfull of MSNBC contributor contracts and book deals five minutes ago.

I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Tip jar below the post if you are so inclined.

Rep. DeLay Preps the Beds for the GOP's Big Sleep

(This particular bit started life as a comment in Gilliard's Shoppe but has been Repurposed to better serve You, The Customer :-)

The little-“p” politics of this is fascinating.  [The fact that] Over the long run that the GOP is demographically/electorally doomed to become the minority Thurston Howell Party again. Either when the Fundy Shining Path Rebels that make up their margin of victory make one too many batshit demands, or are are told “No” once too often.

(If you want to get a clear picture of how this will look, rent “Fatal Attraction” or “Play Misty For Me”. I’m not going to be ignored, George!)

So either they take their bat and ball and stomp disgustedly back to Mordor, or a handful of moderate Republicans get so freaked out by the Randall Terry Wing of the Party that they bolt or stay home.

But short run…Tom DeLay is now a Household Name. Been waiting 10 years for that to happen and always amazed that Republicans had no fucking clue who he was, even though you’d tell them five or a hundred times. Sheesh. All RAM and no Hard Drive with some people.

Every GOP Leader knows the Gingrich Lesson: No matter how much the membership owes you, they’ll go absolutely Lord of The Flies on your Piggy-ass the minute you becomes a measurable liability. Newt was so completely “I Am The Reich” that he would have been perfectly happy to go into the bunker and fight it out until the GOP was razed to rubble had he not been stopped by his own House Republicans.

And since the Suddenly Huge Liability named Tom DeLay is now just “Tell Tale Heart”--thundering away under the GOP floorboards, threatening to drown out everything else, the question is, will that same dynamic play twice?

Well DeLay ain’t Gingrich. He learned from that episode, and they don’t call him The Hammer for his shipwright skills. He spent a decade forcibly collecting GOP testicles and caching them in his private Crown Royal bag. At the slightest provocation he will to politically and personally destroy anyone who doesn’t bend a deep knee to His Gorgon Awfulness.

And both the Texas and National Republican parties have shown absolutely craven willingness to rewrite the Rules on the fly any time the Beast’s wet-bar needed to be restocked with virgin’s blood, or whenever a law or policy might make threaten to cinch-in the bottomless lust he and his stooges have for Power, Money, Trinkets and Perks, even a trifle.

So (hahah!) they’ve kinda disarmed themselves to accommodate him, and now they’re stuck very much up on that very windy gibbet with him. So if you were running in 2006 and playing How Do I Save My Pink Republican Skin while DeLay is holding your ass held hostage, what do you do?

Got to time it juuuust right. Jump away from Herr DeLay too soon and he’ll blow your head off. Jump too late, and your face will be morphed into Tom DeLay…into Randall Terry…into, I dunno, Osama Bin Laden? in every ad, every day, for the entire election cycle.

My simple suggestion for voters in 2006?

Shoot the hostage ;-)

The Tip Jar Is Open

 

My New Gig: Update

Big news!  After 17 years swinging a pickaxe at the independent blogging coal-face, I've landed my first, paid writing gig.  Finally, a regular (and none too shabby) salary.  Health insurance.  Vacation time.  A modest travel stipend.  Work-at-home arrangement.  The whole deal.

That's the good part.

The part that might give some of you a little agita is that my new employer is... The Bulwark.

That's right.  After a few weeks of negotiating, they're bringing me on board as their "Midwest Cultural Correspondent" (the title was my suggestion.)  They're letting me keeping my blog handle (that's apparently my "brand value") and you'll probably be seeing my actual face on their website after a few months of settling in.  

Like most jobs, it comes are a few conditions and strings.  In this case they mostly involve my rate of output and my subject matter.  Specifically, throttling back somewhat on my "saltier" writing about Never Trumpers and focusing more on my unique slant on our values, trends and traditions here in the mighty Midwest.   There's even some talk about rolling our "Science Fiction University" podcast into the regular Bulwark podcast lineup which would increase our listenership something like 100 fold.  Who knows?  Might even get a book deal out of it!

Of course, since I'll be putting in a lot of time getting this new gig off the ground, I'll probably have to cut back on blogging here, but I'll definitely continue swinging around from time to time to do a little of the old stuff.

More later!

Until then...

 *Update:  April Fools!

Live, Laugh, Love

Blogiversary Post: Business

No Half Measures

Blogiversary Post: Taking Sides

No Half Measures

Blogiversary Post: Sicilian Message

No Half Measures

Blogiversary Post: Days of Future Past

So while I was under the weather, it seems my 16th blogiversary slipped right by.

Oops.  Where were your priorities, blogger!

And staring at the ceiling for several days, it came to me that, if I've learned anything after 16 years at this post it's that 16 years is a very long time to stare into the political abyss and write about it every day. Maybe I'll talk about that at greater length later, but it turns out that while I am coming out of the last malady that knocked me flat (yay!), I am also steering into the next thing that's going to keep me feeling like Godzilla kicked my ass for awhile (boo!)

Nothing life-threatening, but painful and unwelcome. Sorta like my congresscritter, Rodney Davis.  

So I'll be brief.  

Well, maybe not "brief".

Also you may consider this a fundraiser :-)  

Fund The Stridency

One of the very first, non-test posts I wrote for this weblog started life as a comment over at the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog.  I was frequent commenter there during the early aughts until he booted me out and told I needed to start my own Little Blog on the Prairie.   

That post from 16 years is the story of the Republican Party as it existed then, how it had gotten to be that way and where it was obviously headed.  And, to borrow a line from True Detective, it was a story with a monster at the end of it.  A deeply corrupt, mentally unstable sociopathic monster which the GOP itself had raised up as its leader at to whom they pledged their fearful fealty.  "Fearful" because everyone knew he was a fucking bug-eyed freak show, and "fealty" because the party had ceded so much power over their political lives to him that one blow from his hammer could turn an ambitious Republican's career to dust.

While your favorite Never Trumpers were busy making very good livings by getting ghouls and hobgoblins elected (looking at you, Lincoln Lads) or using their Hate Radio clout to advance the GOP's loathsome, racist agenda and the fortunes of its foot-soldiers (looking at you, Charlie Sykes) or generally shitting all over everything you value and believe in, this is what certain alarmist, amateur crackpot Liberals like me were seeing, plain as day, when we looking at the GOP as it actually existed 16 years ago: 

Over the long run that the GOP is demographically/electorally doomed to become the minority Thurston Howell Party again. Either when the Fundy Shining Path Rebels that make up their margin of victory make one too many batshit demands, or are are told “No” once too often.

(If you want to get a clear picture of how this will look, rent “Fatal Attraction” or “Play Misty For Me”. I’m not going to be ignored, George!)

So either they take their bat and ball and stomp disgustedly back to Mordor, or a handful of moderate Republicans get so freaked out by the Randall Terry Wing of the Party that they bolt or stay home...

I admit I was slightly wrong about that.  Chalk it up to the optimism of youth.  Turns out "moderate Republicans" didn't exist at all; there were only Republicans who would consort with monsters openly and Republicans who would consort with monsters in the dead of night and in disguise.  And once nut-cuttin' time came, pretty much all those deeply principled Moderate Republicans fell right into line like the good little fascists they always were.

Anyway all of this should sound loudly and painfully familiar because the GOP has not learned or evolved on fucking iota since then.  Quite the opposite: in 2016, after an eight-year racist primal scream over Obama, they demanded another Tom Delay, but Supersized.  

And what happened in the wake of that decision is, once again, nearly identical to what your host was writing/warning about 16 years ago.

...they don’t call him The Hammer for his shipwright skills. He spent a decade forcibly collecting GOP testicles and caching them in his private Crown Royal bag. At the slightest provocation he will to politically and personally destroy anyone who doesn’t bend a deep knee to His Gorgon Awfulness.

And both the Texas and National Republican parties have shown absolutely craven willingness to rewrite the Rules on the fly any time the Beast’s wet-bar needed to be restocked with virgin’s blood, or whenever a law or policy might make threaten to cinch-in the bottomless lust he and his stooges have for Power, Money, Trinkets and Perks, even a trifle.

So (hahah!) they’ve kinda disarmed themselves to accommodate him, and now they’re stuck very much up on that very windy gibbet with him...

"But Uncle driftglass," you ask (so polite!), "what about after Tom Delay finally 'sploded like that guy in Scanners?  After DeLay went *boom*, wasn't there was blood and viscera and indictments everywhere?  Didn't at least the moderate Republicans react in horror at that?"

Well kids, funny story about that.  Because this was the period during which, in order to save their depraved party from extinction and keep their snouts buried in the wingnut welfare media trough, the cream of the Conservative Punditocracy began a swift and tectonic shift in how they talked about the American politics.  Remember, during this period Conservative pundits were unreconstructed Iraq War pimps and they were in clover.  Bush was a fucking genius, wars and massive tax cuts would never put a dent in the budget surplus Bush had inherited from Bill Clinton, and Liberals were, at best, stupid, crackpot alarmists and, at worst, to quote Andrew Sullivan "the decadent left enclaves on the coasts [that] may well mount a Fifth column."

That's how they talked about us.  What they wrote about us.  All the time. So just imagine how few fucks I have to give for Conservatives whining about "cancel culture" having started my blogging career in a media environment where shitting on Liberals, valorizing Dubya and cheerleading the Iraq War was a license to print money and an easy, lazy career fast-track for any Conservative hack or bigot who could push two words together.  

And then several Very Bad Things happened.  

Quicker than you could say "Reagan taught us deficits don't matter" the Clinton surplus was gone, and in its place was a Bush deficit that dwarfed anything that had come before it.  And then came the Bush administration absolute botch of Hurricane Katrina and the unconcealed glee among a number of top-tier Conservative bloggers and Hate Radio creeps at the sight of black people suffering and dying.  But more devastating than Tom DeLay's implosion or the whiplash transformation of surplus into deficit or the obvious Republican incompetence in the face of a hurricane  was the complete collapse of Bush's Iraq Clusterfuck, along with the farrago of lies his administration had told to sell it.  

So, for the elite Conservative pundit, whose career had just enjoyed an exhilarating, rocket-fueled boost thanks to incessant slagging Liberals and fawning over Bush, how does one make one's way forward in a world where the Liberals critique of the Right is being vindicated daily and in real time, and you're stuck out there with nothing but Cheney's wizened dick to hang onto?

Enter Mr. David Fucking Brooks of The New York Times and the story of how Brooks navigated one element -- the fate of Tom DeLay -- of the shitstorm that was roaring through the GOP. 

Mr. Brooks' column about at Tom DeLay from 2004, should be in a museum somewhere.  An exhibit for the ages of what the work of a successful Conservative media toady looks like.  First, oozing praise all over Delay's effectiveness and his good manners and pooh-poohed any suggestion that Delay was a thug:

But there's also the fact that most House Republicans like DeLay. It's always important to remember that most of the mythology that surrounds the Hammer is total nonsense...

He is not the vicious strongman who terrorizes members and reduces them to tears to get their vote. Roy Blunt and Eric Cantor are the whips, not DeLay, and they are anything but vicious.

He's not even a terror to his peers. He can be firm, but he and his staff are noted for their graciousness...

And then praising House Republicans as noble and dedicated reformers who resented having their very high moral standards sullied by, among other things, have to bend the rules to make sure their beloved Hammer didn't get nailed -- 

This week, House Republicans bent their accountability rules to protect their majority leader from what they feel is a partisan Texas prosecutor. But they hated the whole exercise. They sat in a conference room hour after hour wringing their hands. Only a few members were brave enough to stand up and say they shouldn't bend the rule. But afterward, many House Republicans came up to those members and said that secretly they agreed with them...

Brooks went on to warned that, even though Delay might not notice it, his power might be ever so slightly slipping (Brooks has always been very big on passing along his unverifiable hunches and wishes as secret, insider dope that only he is privy to) and that if there were any more scandals, well, there was always that nice Mr. Hastert waiting in the wings should those fearless, incorruptible House Republicans tire of Mr. Delay:

He doesn't face an immediate threat. But the next time a scandal licks up against him, DeLay will find his support is not as strong as he thought it would be. He'll turn around and find that his caucus has remembered its core values. 

Savor that last paragraph for a moment and then let us join Mr. Brooks a little over a year later in full freak-out mode in a column entitled "Save The House":

I don't know what's more pathetic, Jack Abramoff's sleaze or Republican paralysis in the face of it. Abramoff walks out of a D.C. courthouse in his pseudo-Hasidic homburg, and all that leading Republicans can do is promise to return his money and remind everyone that some Democrats are involved in the scandal, too.

That's a great G.O.P. talking point: some Democrats are so sleazy, they get involved with the likes of us...

Have I mentioned recently that Mr. Brooks has been completely wrong about everything since forever?

Yeah, it turns out that those virtuous, high-minded House Republican reformers he was extoling were none of those things.  Or, rather, Republicans once again turned out to be everything Liberals had said they were. 

But Republicans need to do more than bump DeLay. They need to put the entire leadership team up for a re-vote. That's because the real problem wasn't DeLay, it was DeLayism, the whole culture that merged K Street with the Hill, and held that raising money is the most important way to contribute to the team.

Catch that?  "Republicanism" wasn't the problem because "Republicanism" can never be the problem.  Instead, a meaningless made-up nonsense word -- Delayism -- was somehow to blame just as now Trumpism is the Big Bad.

So what should the GOP do to fix itself?

First, they need to hold new leadership elections. As Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber told me yesterday...

I know.  It just gets better and better.

And who does Brooks offer up as the saviors of the GOP?

You're gonna laugh...

A party led by young talents like Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence and Mark Kirk would be taken seriously as a party of reform.

I told you you'd laugh.  

Then came a bunch of stuff that were either terrible ideas or were never going to happen, followed by:

Finally, today -- before noon -- fire Bob Ney as chairman of the House Administration Committee. For God's sake, Republicans, show a little moral revulsion.

There has always been a lively debate on the Left as to whether David Brooks was just a colossal schmuck who Republicans could toy with, lie to and otherwise bamboozle over and over again and who never catches on, or whether he is just a pathological liar who has succeeded in life by telling the wealth and powerful the comforting, toxic fairy tales they wish to believe are true.

Well, there's ample evidence on both sides, but hey, I promised you a peek into the formative moments of a major shift in how elite Conservatives in the media -- standing in the rubble of the Bush Administration and the ruin of the Tom Delay's House of Representatives -- would deflect and diffuse accountability for all Republican future atrocities, didn't I?  

So join me now and witness the ascension of Both Siderism to the status of official state religion among Conservative pundits and their mainstream media collaborators as reflected in how David Brooks will now use use the implosion of Tom Delay's political career.  Mind you, Brooks cobbled together the following column -- "Party No. 3" -- less than eight months after his "For God's sake, Republicans, show a little moral revulsion." column.  For those of you who have heard it before, you know where we're going.

There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind. The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

Did I mention that Brooks was absolutely livid that his very good friend Holy Joe Lieberman was defeated in a free and fair Democratic primary?

So what exactly is the "McCain-Lieberman Party"?  It's David Brooks' entire "Wouldn't it be cool if..." wish list stuffed in to one kielbasa.  It's his the "All Good Things and No Bad Things" Party and what kind of asshole would a person have to be to stand against that!

And the other two parties?  The real parties?  Well according to Brooks they're both so equally awful in exactly the same ways that there is really no point in examining them separately.  Or factually.

Instead...

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

And here comes the Delay!

But the experience of 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.

And just like *that* Tom Delay stops being "Tom Delay" and began his new life as as the ideological counterpart of those scurrilous and wholly imaginary "net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party".

On some level Brooks knows his "All Good Things and No Bad Things" Party will  never happen but perhaps (and this is why The New York Times pays him the big money) one of the parties will be wise enough to adopt McCain-Liebermanism -- another one of Brooks' hideous neologisms that he coins in the column's last, dying gasps.

The history of third parties is that they get absorbed into one of the existing two, and that will probably happen here. John McCain and Hillary Clinton will try to reconcile their centrist approaches with the hostile forces in their own parties. And maybe they will succeed.

And in explaining that it would be easier for McCain to absorb the wisdom of McCain-Liebermanism (after all, his name was already on the letterhead) Brooks could not help venting his spleen one last time on the real villains here: Liberals.

McCain has a better chance, since the ideologues on the right feel vulnerable while the ideologues on the left, perpetually two years behind the national mood, think the public wants more rage.

Brooks' was beside himself with rage that the Left would dare to primary his very dear, morally bankrupt, backstabbing friend Joe Lieberman, and he never forgave us for humiliating him over and over again by being right about Iraq, the Bush administration generally and, well, the entire Republican Party.  So he couldn't resist bitterly asserting that we crazy alarmist Liberals are "perpetually two years behind the national mood" and that we couldn't possibly be honestly and justifiably furious at what the GOP was doing to the country.  Instead it must all be cynically performative -- the "net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party" putting on a little show because we thought it would go over well with the public.  

And this is when the tectonic shift began.   A period when things were going very badly for the GOP and were about to get ever so much worse.  They were about to get creamed in the midterms.  The Iraq War was now clearly seen as a disaster, possibly on a scale not seen since Vietnam.  A number of Bush Administration scandals were beginning to draw blood.  There was the aforementioned Hurricane Katrina.  There was Terri Schiavo.  Credible rumors that torture had secretly become official U.S. policy. And the economy was getting ready to collapse.   

Suddenly all of the talking points that unreconstructed Iraq War pimps like Brooks has used as career rocket fuel --  Bush was genius, we are victorious in Iraq, deficits are never coming back, Liberals are Bush-deranged idiots -- were turning to ash in their mouths.  And so began the Golden Age of "Both Sides Do It" with David Brooks leading the way.  

From now on, virtually every single David Brooks column would be the same column over and over again.  There would never be another Republican atrocity that would not be deflected and diffused by a "...but the Democrats" column from Mr. Brooks asserting that, while the facts of whatever-it-is-this-week may not be in dispute, out there somewhere, perceptible only to Mr. Brooks antennae, there was probably some Liberal doing something just as bad.  Maybe worse!  

Every escalation of Republican obstructionism, sabotage and hysteria would henceforth be blamed on "The Extremes on Both Sides!" who were ruining everything for the vast, calm, reasonable and completely fictional Center that Mr. Brooks claimed to speak for.  

"Both Sides Do It" was the perfect, all-occasion Big Lie for media hacks and frauds everywhere so it propagated fast, fast, fast like a plague.  It became holy writ in the mainstream media.  The Sunday Shows became temples to it, where each week the same panels of gasbags gathered to ritually repeat the Big Lie.  It was suffocating.  It was Orwellian.  It was everywhere.  And it was the greatest gift the increasingly unhinged and openly racist Republican Party could have hoped for.  Because the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It demanded that the teller of that lie give up objectively evaluating and reporting on anything in its own context.  Give up doing actual journalism and thereby voluntarily choose to deprive themselves of the one tool they would need to see just how dangerous the GOP was becoming.

In the last 16 years I've written literally thousands of posts on the subject of Both Siderism and its corrosive  toxicity.  So have many other Liberal bloggers.  And instead of being given a fair hearing, we have routinely been mocked and ignored -- "cancelled" if you will -- by the same mainstream media that mocked and ignored us during the Bush Administration.  Just ask respected, sober-minded D.C. political analysts Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann who were all but blackballed for saying out-loud what every already knew but refused to talk about. 

This blanket cancellation of those of us who saw where the Both Sides Do It lie was leading and spoke out about it was due in no small part to the fact that those unreconstructed Iraq War pimps I referred to earlier hadn't been driven out of polite society as would have happened in an healthy culture.  Instead many of them had been immediately handed influential jobs-for-life in the mainstream media where they had become  -- surprise! --the bishops and cardinals of the High and Holy Church of Both Side Do It.

Time passed.  

The cult of Both Siderism thrived.

David Brooks continued to make a fine living and enjoy the accolades of his peers while being jaw-droppingly wrong about everything.

Dire Liberal warnings about the trajectory of the GOP were repeatedly ignored.  

Things got exponentially worse. 

And then came Trump.  

Suddenly, the very few unreconstructed Conservative Iraq War pimps (who were now Both Siderist High Priests) who spoke against Trump and found themselves run out of the party.  Almost overnight they were on the outside of their GOP looking in.  And they began demanding to know what the fuck had just happed, who were all of these crazy people and how did they get in here!

And we on the Left had answers for them.  Clear, well-documented answers.  But as it was during the Rise of Hate Radio, the Rise of Gingrich, the Rise of Delay and the Iraq War debacle, the rise of Trump was clearly the result of massive, long-term dereliction, lying and willful blindness on the part of the now-completely dysfunctional mainstream media and elite Conservatives.  And these guys -- who now called themselves "Never Trumpers" -- emphatically did not want to hear those answers because those answers clearly implicated them. 

Instead, they floated a series of zany and (most-importantly) self-absolving theories to explain How We Came To This Sorry Pass, all of which were obvious hogwash.  But since the mainstream press had no interest whatsoever in an explanation of the Rise of Trump that began, "The Republican Party has been racing towards white nationalist fascism for decades and you have been doing everything in your power to lie about it..." once again the Liberals who had been right all along were shoved aside by the media, while another clutch of Republicans who had been wrong all along -- the Never Trumpers -- were handed control of the narrative.

Are we seeing a pattern yet?

So after all of this, how stands the High and Holy Church of Both Do It?

Well, it's battered but still standing.  

On the one hand, in the twinkling of an eye, some of yesterday's most relentless peddlers of Both Siderist snake oil --

-- have suddenly become some of today's most emphatic opponents of it.  Without, of course, ever acknowledging that they had ever said or believed otherwise.

And the stank coming off of Both Siderism is strong enough in some quarters that no less a mainstream media mainstay than Lester Holt is now unafraid to say a few words against it.  From Crooks & Liars:

At Long Last, A Network TV Anchor Admits: Both Sides Don't

Lester Holt accepts his lifetime achievement award by admitting that "fairness is overrated" because lies aren't worthy of news media attention.

Which predictably caused Conservative schlock shops like Fox News and The National Review to lose their minds.

So good job troops!

But now that the immediate threat of Trump in the Oval Office has passed, those of us who have made it our job to carefully watch and listen and write down what we believe is coming next, can hear the unmistakable sounds of the usual suspects struggling to slide "...but the Democrats" back into their lexicon.  

Because these fuckers never learn.  

No Half Measures