Professional Left Podcast Episode 1019: Where's the Beef?

“A__ Po_itics is _oca_."  -- The legacy media needs to buy a vowel.

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The Lincoln Curse?

As you probably already know, Donald Trump has turned the USS Abraham Lincoln into a floating gulag for any sailor unlucky enough to be stationed there:

Trump says record USS Lincoln deployment 'not nearly long enough'

President Donald Trump reacted to reports of poor conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln on Friday, claiming that families of service members are "not" concerned and saying that the vessel hasn't been deployed for "nearly long enough."

The president also confirmed that a new aircraft carrier is headed to the Middle East to replace it during a very brief gaggle with reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Friday afternoon. 

The aircraft carrier's movements come amid reports of mental health and supply issues aboard the USS Lincoln, whose long deployment to the Middle East in support of the Iran war includes a record-setting time at sea of more than 200 days. Navy leaders, including the Navy's acting Secretary Hung Cao, last week held a heated town hall for families of the USS Lincoln who had raised concerns about the conditions on the ship.

Tapper: What is your husband saying about conditions on the ship? Wife of Service Member Aboard USS Lincoln: My husband is appalled at the conditions on this ship. This is not his first deployment. And he is saying that it is the worst deployment that he's ever been on. His shipmates say the same.

[image or embed]

— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) August 14, 2026 at 8:31 PM

This should come as no surprise, as Donald Trump has never given a shit about the United States military except as a toy for him to play with.  Trump also thinks anyone willing to risk their life for their country is a "sucker" and a "loser". 

John Kelly confirms Trump privately disparaged U.S. service members and veterans

Trump called fallen soldiers "suckers” and "losers" during his presidency, according to a 2020 report in The Atlantic.

But do you remember the fate of the USS Abraham Lincoln during the last Republican administration that lied us into a disastrous war in the Middle East and then catastrophically botched it?  

It was in all the papers.

That would be Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, delivered on May 1, 2003.

And that, just two days before that speech, the cover story of the now-defunct Weekly Standard featured David Brooks declaring that The War Was Over! 

Yay!  

The Good Guys had triumphed! Neoconservatism had been vindicated.  And it was time for the resistance to crawl under a nearby porch and quietly die, or dry up and blow away or dissolve into laughably delusional absurdism.  

Pieces of Mr. Brooks' radioactively reckless and vindictive claptrap can be found here.

As you literati know, maritime myth and literature are full of stories about ships "sailing under a doom." The story of Jonah from the Bible.  The tale of the Mary Celeste.  The legend of the Flying Dutchman.  Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Poe's MS. Found in a Bottle.  Melville's Moby Dick.  And so on.

Now I'm not saying that the USS Abraham Lincoln is cursed.  I am saying that, if it is cursed, we definitely know why.  And that, out of an abundance of caution, it wouldn't hurt to burn some sage, flick a little holy water around, ring some church bells, and never, ever put another Republican in the White House.   

I Am The Liberal Media

They're The Same Picture

Burn The Lifeboats

Dubya Walked So Trump Could Run: Part 1003.

As you read this, please note that this NBC headline is not from last week.

It's from 20 years ago.  NBC, August 8, 2006:

Administration seeks to weaken war crimes law

The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments...

Bush regime panic was triggered by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which ruled that the Bush regime's existing military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees violated both U.S. military law and parts of the Geneva Conventions.

The Bush Regime's reaction to that ruling was on par with General Saito's reaction to the Conventions in The Bridge on the River Kwai

Since it was pretty clear Republicans were widely expected to get their asses kicked in the 2006 midterms and lose control of one or both houses of Congress (sound familiar?) with Republicans facing the likely end of four years of unified control of Washington.  Before that happened the Bush regime hurry-up-quick rammed through the  Military Commissions Act.

Remember: it authorized new military tribunals, drastically narrowed the definition of punishable war crimes under U.S. law, gave the president broader authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions, and attempted to block detainees from challenging their detention through habeas corpus petitions in federal court. 

There was little debate or somber reflection of what this might mean.

Instead it flew through the Republican-controlled Senate on September 28, 2006.  The vote was, Republicans: 53 despicably predictable yesses, 1 no, 1 absent,  Democrats: 12 shameful yesses, 32 no, and Independent: 0 yes, 1 no.

Then it flew through the Republican-controlled House the very next day, September 29, 2006.  The vote was, Republicans: 218 despicably predictable yesses, 7 no, 5 not voting, Democrats: 32 shameful yesses, 162 no, 7 not voting,  Independent: 0 yes, 1 no 

Then George W. Bush signed it into law on October 17, 2006.  But in 2008, the Supreme Court (No kidding!  Guess you had to be there!) ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that the law’s attempt to strip detainees of habeas corpus rights was unconstitutional.   The court was split 5-4, and it will surprise absolutely no one that the four Republican-appointed dissenters were John Roberts,  Nino Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

You see kids, the depraved values and trajectory of the Republican party were there for anyone to see who cared to look with honest eyes.  A Republican president and his blood-thirsty regent who believed the president should be able to rule as an emperor (as long as he was a Republican.)  A Republican Congress eager to let the president do it (as long as he was a Republican.)  And a slim Republicans minority on the court -- two appointed by Dubya, one appointed by Dubya's daddy, and one appointed by Dubya's daddy's boss -- willing to bless that unholy Republican aspiration.   

I keep 20 or 30 of these examples in my back pocket for when our Never Trump supervisors figuratively put their feet up on our coffee table, swill our good beer and begin to wax nostalgic about the "good old days" of the GOP before Trump.

I usually get through three or four examples before they block me and stomp away.  Which is weird, 'cause didn't you want to talk about the past?

Burn The Lifeboats

Alt History

All the way back during the closing days of the Before Time, as the GOP was loping eagerly at speed towards the monstrous abyss into which they have now dragged us, I began documenting a rapidly spreading Republican condition, which I called Republican Detachment Disorder.  

From me in January of 2016:

Now that Donald Barnum Trump, Failgunner Ted Cruz and the caravan of benighted shoutycracker GOP candidate wannabes that follow them around have removed any lingering doubt that nothing short of the Bến Tre Option --

'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'

-- will ever "fix" what is actually wrong with the GOP, the Republican establishment's most obedient and reliable public avatars have all suddenly come down with the same, tragic affliction: Republican Detachment Disorder.

Symptoms include adopting the basic Liberal critique of the Right chapter-and-verse while forgetting to acknowledge that "Liberals" as such even exist, and pretending that "the Republican establishment" is some mysterious directorate that you barely know which meets in a secret lair far, far away instead of a club which you have been a card-carrying member of for your entire adult life.

Today's spotlight Republican Detachment Disorder sufferer: David Frum.

Maybe the Republican Establishment Can’t Have It All

Given their failure to take down Donald Trump, is it time for GOP elites to let go of some cherished inward-facing policy priorities? 

...

Maybe it’s time for the party’s elites to let go of some of their cherished inward-facing policy priorities.

Notice how RDD particularly affects the speech centers of the brain. "[T]he Republican Establishment" instead of "we". "Given their failure" instead of "Given our failure." "[T]he party's elite" instead of "Me and David Brooks and Michael Gerson and Ross Douthat and the rich fuckers we work for".

Sad, really.

But there is hope!

With your generous support, blogs like this can continue working tirelessly towards the goal of eliminating RDD in our lifetime...

 Which I simplified to this in March of 2016:

It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.

Then I spent more time than I should have documenting one prominent Republican/Conservative after another deploying the same lies in the same order.  That the GOP had gone spontaneously mad.  That they had nothing to do with it.  That once they caught wind of it they'd righteously rebuked everyone involved, but before that moment there was nothing detectably wrong with the GOP. 

Every one of these lies was and is ludicrous on its face, and yet the promulgators of these lies were invited to spout them on the largest legacy media outlets in the country, while those on the Left who had been warning for decades about the dangerous trajectory of the GOP were given the stiff arm and the stink-eye by those same legacy media outlets.

Which led me to ask why?  

And the answer is pretty simple and twofold.

First, the creators of this new mythology already had deep, fraternal ties to major legacy media outlets.  They all knew each other professionally and socially, so once places like MSNBC went full-time into the Republican reputation rehab business, GOP spin doctors and comms people and ad merchants who had bet wrong on the rise of Trump and fallen from grace from the party were lining up three deep to get the Nicole Wallace treatment.  

And second, the gauzy, heroic bunkum these Never Trumpers were selling was much more congenial to the legacy media's self-image than the hard truths Lefty writers and podcasts were offering.  In the actual history of the era that Liberals were documenting, the legacy media was deeply complicit in the rise of a monster like Trump, spending decades ostentatiously ignoring what was really going on on the Right, or, when the stench of racism and crazy leaking out of GOP containment got too knock-the-flies-off-a-shitwagon strong to ignore, they'd "Both Sides Do It" handwave any concerns.

Obviously this is a story the legacy media wants no part of.  

But the fiction the Never Trumpers were selling?  That the entire Republican base just suddenly went nuts one day and no one coulda seen it coming?  That maybe a lot of it was actually justifiable backlash to all those terrible, imaginary excesses of the Left?  That was a story the Beltway was only too happy to metabolize, to repeat endlessly, and to promote to the front of the line any recently-former Republican who was willing to help them sell it.  

And over the course of the last decade you can actually track as this bullshit hardened into the foundation of Beltway-approved agreed-upon history of the era.  Then, once the foundation was laid, came all of the refinements and embellishments.  

So what we're going to do now is step back in time to 2016 and watch as Republican Detachment Disorder became the go-to alibi for Conservatives trying to run away from what they had helped do to their own party.  Then we're going to jump back to present day for a small taste of how that fiction has evolved.  For the stroll down Cursed Memory Lane, I'll mostly provide links only to Conservatives as they floated their own variation of RDD.  If you want to dive deeper, have at it.

January, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Tucker Carlson, Super Class Warrior Hero Guy.

January, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Boss Limbaugh.

In his article in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan's former protege -- Young Conor Friedersdorf -- makes the following case:

Rush Limbaugh Doesn't Know He's Part of the Establishment

A portrait of a man who is unaware of his role in the system that he savages...

February, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Frank Luntz.

February, 2016:  David Brooks' Life When It Is Written Will Read Better Than It Lived

David Brooks -- the world's most ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual, globe-trotting lecturer on character and humility and Patient Zero of Republican Detachment Disorder -- managed to write an entire fucking column about the madness which has killed his Republican Party...
...without mentioning the word "Republican" at all.
Instead...
They want “outsiders"
They delegitimize...
They’re willing to trample...
they don’t recognize other people...
They suffer from a form of political narcissism...
they don’t accept the legitimacy of...
They don’t recognize restraints.
They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.
The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience...
The antipolitics people don’t accept...
They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations...
The antipolitics people refuse compromise...

February, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ron Fournier, The Sad Clown of Centrism

March, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson

Themselves. Them. Not "me". Them. Thus begins the tsk-tsking cavil lecture of yet another Republican who stood proudly with a party that has been coasting along on the momentum of the Southern Strategy for his entire adult life.  Yet another Republican who stood proudly by an Administration which resorted without hesitation to the tried-and-true Republican electoral strategy of Fox News, Hate Radio, mass-slander and demonization to win re-election in 2004...

April, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Joe Scarborough

May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Peggy Noonan Finds Her Magic Cab Driver

May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Jennifer Rubin

Key Date.  From NPR, May 26, 2016: Donald Trump Clinches GOP Nomination

June, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ramesh Ponnuru

By June of 2016, Suddenly There Is No "I" In "Republican"  Note the time.  Almost exactly  decade ago, when all of these Conservative heavy-hitters and dozens of others had begun to change their political pronouns.

Key Date.  From CNN, July 19, 2016: It’s official: Trump is Republican nominee

July, 2016: Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero

September, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: George Will

October 20, 2016:  Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol -- Cannibals Fighting Over The Place Settings -- in which they traded "This wasn't my fault, this was your fault" finger-pointing.  

December, 2017:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder [Bret Stephens]

 December, 2017: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Charlie Sykes

They're all in on it.  All of them.  And 18 months to two years is officially the new, Beltway Approved Absolution Lifeboat.  And all of the Republican scumbags who reaped enormous rewards for decades paving the road down which Donald Trump shambled to the White House -- who are now frantically  rebranding themselves as "independent" 30 years too late once -- are scrambling on board.  From Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough yesterday:  "Republicans across the United States will now pay a heavy price for two years of moral indifference."

There are dozens more, and a lot of repeat customers:  the same elite Republican pundits and opinion-havers using the commanding media heights of the multiple platforms on which they are welcome, all hard-selling the same lie over and over and over again.

Now buckle up as we quantum leap from a decade ago to five days ago to observe how deeply rooted in the everyday political language of Never Trumpers this detachment disorder has become, and how every other political event has been warped to fit that narrative.

The occasion was The Bulwark's live thing in Los Angeles.  Big crowds.  Much merch.  Much call-and-response.  A delegation from the Pod Save Lads showed up.  And during the event, Bulwark owner and publisher, Sarah Longwell, regaled the audience with her version of history...

Sam Stein: What is the Bush line? Like what actually number is the Bush line? 

Sarah Longwell:  Uh this is a great question... It's 32%.  But that is that is the number that George W. Bush was at when he left office. Okay? And the reason again that this is important is if you think about the historical precedent when Bush left office, the Republican party never recovered from his unpopularity. 

This is so ridiculous I almost don't know where to begin.  In 2010, Longwell was working for conservative PR outfit in Washington D.C. and was recruited into the Log Cabin Republicans, where she eventually became chair  From that vantage point, surely she could not have missed the Giant Red Wave that deluged Washington in 2010 and completely reversed the political fortunes of Ms. Longwell's party.

I mean, I don't know exactly how Ms. Longwell would measure "recovered popularity", but it seems to me that taking back the House in 2010 with a net gain of 63 seats -- the largest turnover of seats by either party since 1948 -- constitutes a pretty good metric of resurgent popularity.  As does the net seven seat Republican pickup in the Senate, picking up six governorships, 680 state legislative seats, flipping control of 20 legislative chambers across the country, and having "independent" voters, who had largely voted for Democrats in 2006 and 2008, swinging overwhelmingly to the right.

And how did Sarah Longwell's party achieve this amazing feat?  They did it by throwing everything they had into the largest coordinated campaign of often openly racist slander, obstruction, sabotage, and fear-mongering in modern political history, all aimed at destroying Obama before he even got started.  If you're interested in the gory details, we did a whole podcast about that very subject last week:

Add to that the massive Republican "Tea Party" branding scam in which the legacy media abetted the lie that somehow the base of the party had just up and disappeared one day and had been replaced by a brand new "movement" -- heavily financed by the Kochs and promoted around the clock by Fox News.  These Teabaggers had two things in common: they swore they'd never heard of George W. Bush and they despised the black guy in the White House and eagerly rallied behind every racist lie about Death Panels and "government takeovers" and birth certificates and on and on.  They flooded town hall meetings, shrieking about Communists.  They suddenly cared about deficits.  

In Congress, Republicans did everything they could do to drag the Great Recession out as long as possible -- ferociously opposing the Obama plan for saving the economy, extorting concessions so that the final package was only half the size it should have been (and a third of that was tax cuts) and then voting against everything along party lines.  So by 2010, with the Republican base rage-drunk on Fox News racist propaganda, and hapless "independents" terrified by the legacy media repeating Conservative lies unchallenged, the GOP was able to grab hold of real levers of power at the national and state level and use them to further hobble Obama administration initiatives.  

Ms. Longwell resumes.  

Longwell:   He had a bad war and he had a bad economy.  That sounds familiar, right? And so when you have those things, what happened is then the Republicans went into the wilderness. They lost two national elections. They struggled with their political identity only to have Trump then come in and completely revamp the party. 

First, notice the pronouns?  The same sleight of hand as a decade earlier.  "the Republicans went...", "They lost...", "They struggled...", not "We lost..." or "We struggled..."  

Second, in the Republican voter's berserk reaction to Barack Obama -- their eight-year-long racist primal scream -- it's painfully obvious that their "political identity" was right there in plain sight for anyone to see who cared to.  Once a reality show douchebag and skeevy real-estate slimeball named Donald Trump latched onto the biggest and most overtly racist lie of that era and ran with it (from Politico, August 4, 2010) --

41% of GOP: Obama foreign-born

On President Barack Obama’s birthday, a new CNN/Opinion Research released Wednesday shows 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country.

 -- it's very clear that a plurality of the party had no "political identity" problem at all.

Now, stack that Big Stupid Lie on top of all the other Big Stupid Lies Republicans believed.  For example:

From Politifact, December 18, 2009:

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'Death panels'

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

"Death panels."

From KUNC Colorado, June 18, 2012:

As the Supreme Court is about to rule on the constitutionality of the health care law, one-third of Americans are worrying about a part of the legislation that isn’t there.

A Kaiser Family Foundation’s tracking poll [.pdf] found in March that 36 percent of respondents erroneously believe that the law “would allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” Another 20 percent said they are not sure whether it does.

The foundation, a nonpartisan organization that provides health policy analysis, reports the “prevalence of these misconceptions is essentially the same it was at the end of 2010.”

From PolitiFact, December 17, 2010:

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'A government takeover of health care'

In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."

"Takeovers are like coups," Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. "They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."

The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the "public option" concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.

But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn't let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.

From Pew, November 2, 2010:

Majority of Republicans No Longer See Evidence of Global Warming

A 53%-majority of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, fully 70% say there is no evidence. 

Add to these Big Stupid Lies all the dozens of Smaller Stupid Lies that were firehosing out of the Conservative media puke-funnel, hyped by Republican party leaders, and passed along uncritically by the legacy media, and even a low-born, nobody blogger from the middle of Middle America like me could see that this was not a party lost in "the political wilderness" in any way.

In fact, the "political identity" of the Republican party was never in question at all.  

They were and are the same mob of bigots and imbeciles we Liberals have been warning about for decades.  The "reprogrammable meatbags" which the GOP has spent decades and billions of dollars cultivating, and about which I've been writing on this here blog for +21 years.  

And yet back in the Before Time when it might have mattered, not a single Never Trump you can name had a problem with any of it.   They were perfectly willing to ride this rage-and-racism fueled rocket as long as it took them where they wanted to go.  As long as it got their guys elected.  Which is why Longwell's notion that "Trump [came] in and completely revamp[ed] the party" is not just laughable, but exactly backwards:  Trump didn't change the party, he revealed it.  The base wasn't bamboozled by Trump, the base manifested Trump as the avatar of their truest selves.   

And that's the shame Never Trumpers refuse to face.  That they built the Republican electoral meth lab, supplied the chemicals and created the distribution network.  All Trump ever did was use their own lab and their own chemicals to cook their own product better and purer than they did.  

Back to Ms. Longwell for her solution:  

Longwell:  But like the one way that [the Republican party might become something that is not a criminal enterprise, that is not like an authoritarian fascist enterprise] ... the one way that it would happen is for Donald Trump to leave office with America going that fucking sucked. Like we don't want to do that again. We want to discredit Trump and everybody in his administration, right? You want Rubio and JD Vance to wear Trump like an albatross around their necks.

Well best of luck with that.  I hope it works.  However, since I've been to this rodeo more than once already, I feel it is my duty to mention that, prior to Trump, the previous Worst President in Modern American History was George W. Bush.  After whom her "Bush line" is named.  And after he left office, there was a broad consensus that, god damn, that was awful.  And golly, we sure don't want to do that again!

And yet, in the blink of an eye, the Republican base had scuttled through the Bush-Off Machine and was reborn as blameless, patriotic Tea Baggers.  

Conservative hacks and henchmen in the media all kept their jobs or got promotions, and many of the Bush administration's loudest cheerleaders were rewarded with positions at The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The New York Times.  

Overnight, the entire Conservative media machine became the very loud, very racist, and very profitable Voice of the Resistance.  

Ann Coulter went right on making scads of cash writing garbage.   

Just before Obama took office 2008, Rush Limbaugh signed a $400 million, 8-year deal.

Bush's go-to torture apologist, John Yoo, was appointed the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law.

Paul "Spitcomb" Wolfowitz was gifted the presidency of the World Bank.

Dick Cheney's mini-me spawn, Liz, was elected to the House and quickly rose to a leadership position by telling monstrous, toxic lies just like dear old dad.

And as far as I can tell, most of the rest of them ended up being re-elected to congress, as regular MSNBC contributors, or with their own shows on MSNBC.  

And I see no reason why the people with the megaphones wouldn't rerun the process of mass strategic forgettery and ouchless absolution post-Trump just as they did post-George W.    Because RDD is still as contagious as the flu and more persistent than herpes.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

Started/Going 2026

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 988: Schrödinger's Alliances

"The only governing rule that we all recognize is: always sit close to an exit and never trust a man who doesn't sweat."  --  Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 987: The Vice of the People

"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice."  --  Gore Vidal

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 980: Zombie Apocalypse

"My zombie films were all sort of satirical, with political messages. So I was doing them inexpensively and quietly off in left field somewhere." --   George A. Romero

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One Debacle After Another

From The Huffington Post, September 17, 2006:

Halliburton and Cheney: War Profiteers in Chief Fight to Keep Their Wallets Fat

Halliburton's stock has risen 200% since the invasion of Iraq three and a half years ago. David Lesar, its CEO, made over $40,000,000 in 2004 alone.

Until very recently, there has been relatively little penetration into the popular psyche of the role played by Halliburton in particular and other private military contractors in general. 

The reason is simple: the Bush Administration and its Congressional foot soldiers ranging from George Allen and John Warner of Virginia to Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania have refused at every turn to allow for any oversight at all, even though Democratic Senators have asked for such bi-partisan review for years. 

From The New York Times today:

Deferring to Trump, G.O.P. Lawmakers Resist a Public Accounting on Iran

Nearly three weeks into a war that polls show is unpopular, top Republicans have yet to call administration officials to testify about it, arguing that hearings would put divisions on display.

 
From The Center for Public Integrity, March 19, 2013

Invasion of Iraq, 10 years later

More than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two years, according to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity. Those companies donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush—a little over $500,000—than to any other politician over the last dozen years, the Center found.

Kellogg, Brown & Root, the subsidiary of Halliburton—which Vice President Dick Cheney led prior to being chosen as Bush’s running mate in August 2000—was the top recipient of federal contracts for the two countries, with more than $2.3 billion awarded to the company. Bechtel Group, a major government contractor with similarly high-ranking ties, was second at around $1.03 billion.

However, dozens of lower-profile, but well-connected, companies shared in the reconstruction bounty. Their tasks ranged from rebuilding Iraq’s government, police, military and media to providing translators for use in interrogations and psychological operations. There are even contractors to evaluate the contractors.

Nearly 60 percent of the companies had employees or board members who either served in or had close ties to the executive branch for Republican and Democratic administrations, for members of Congress of both parties, or at the highest levels of the military.

The results of the Center’s six-month investigation provide the most comprehensive list to date of American contractors in the two nations that were attacked in Washington’s war on terror. Based on the findings, it did not appear that any one government agency knew the total number of contractors or what they were doing. Congressional sources said they hoped such a full picture would emerge from the General Accounting Office, which has begun investigating the postwar contracting process amid allegations of fraud and cronyism.

The Center’s investigation focused on the three agencies that awarded most of the Iraq and Afghanistan contracts in 2002 and 2003—the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. It found that nearly every one of the 10 largest contracts awarded for Iraq and Afghanistan went to companies employing former high-ranking government officials or individuals with close ties to those agencies or Congress.

In addition, those top 10 contractors were established political donors, contributing nearly $11 million to national political parties, candidates and political action committees since 1990, according to an analysis of campaign finance records.

Indeed, most of the companies that won contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan were political players. According to the Center’s analysis, the companies, their political action committees and their employees contributed a total of nearly $49 million to national political campaigns and parties since 1990. Donations to Republican Party committees—the Republican National Committee, the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee—outpaced those to Democratic committees, $12.7 million to $7.1 million. Among individual candidates, President George Bush received more money from these companies than any other, a little over $500,000.

From The New York Times, 16 years later:

Firm That Planned Trump’s Jan. 6 Rally Received No-Bid Contracts

This administration has given the company, staffed by the president’s allies, multimillion-dollar contracts it was guaranteed to win.

The Trump administration has bypassed regular procedures to award more than $13 million in contracts to the company that helped organize President Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021, repeatedly creating hidden business opportunities that only one firm could win.

Those contracts have transformed Event Strategies Inc., staffed by veterans of Mr. Trump’s campaigns and first White House, from a minor federal contractor into the government’s highest-paid event planner. The firm has arranged celebrations of the Navy’s 250th birthday and a Treasury Department event to tout new savings accounts for children, called “Trump accounts.”

By law, federal agencies are generally supposed to seek competing bids before awarding contracts, to get the best value for taxpayers. Event Strategies won contracts that were particularly lucrative, the kind that other companies say they would have liked to win.

In at least five cases, other firms never got the chance.

Instead, the agencies invoked legal loopholes meant for special situations — instances of urgent need, or cases where only one specialized vendor could do a job — and gave the contracts to Event Strategies.

Different Times article, next day:

A pair of senior Democratic lawmakers on Thursday demanded answers from the White House about efforts by Jared Kushner to raise billions of dollars from Middle East governments for his private-equity fund while also serving as an envoy in the region for the Trump administration.

Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the most senior member of his party on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a pair of letters to the White House and to Mr. Kushner’s firm that they had “serious concerns about whether the White House is letting Mr. Kushner use his influence for personal financial gain.”

I Am The Liberal Media

A Continuation, Not an Aberration

It is time once again for a feature you will only find on OG Liberal blogs that dare to dig back into the Before Time to notice how much of the deranged, disastrous Trump  policies are not an aberration but a continuation of the trajectory the Republican party has been on for decades.  

Now we could spend this post talking about Republican hypocrisy around debts and deficits, their reliance on demonizing relatively powerless groups to win elections, or their obsession with stripping women of their bodily autonomy.  But since today's headlines are all about a ruinous Republican war-of-choice in the Middle East, let's talk about that.  And let's begin by reminding ourselves that next week will mark the 22nd anniversary of this moment from the 2004 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.  

You know, back in the Good Old Days!  Back when Republicans took America to war soberly and seriously, with careful preparation and on the basis of unimpeachable intelligence!

Yes, that was the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, cracking wise about not finding WMD in Iraq.  Which, you might remember, was the entire predicate for that disaster.   And right therewith him, applauding and laughing their asses off, were Washington's political elite, the cream of the Washington press corps and their celebrity guests.  Because Bush making light of not being able to find the WMD was just so damn funny!

You will also remember that, three years later, as the Bush administration was imploding and the war in Iraq was now indisputably a catastrophe – after Hurricane Katrina, after Terri Schiavo, after Republicans were crushed in the midterms and Bush’s poll numbers had cratered – we find Bush's Brain, Karl Rove, doing this at the 2007 WHCD:

And who's that right behind Rove?  One of his backup dancers on that infamous evening?

Yes it's David Gregory.  Four years after the Iraq invasion, three years after Bush’s WMD joke video, during a period when the Bush administration was under heavy criticism over the war and the Valerie Plame scandal, there’s Dancin' David Gregory happily going along with the bit.

A year later Gregory would be promoted to the Big Chair on Meet the Press, where he would spend the next six years destroying whatever shreds of credibility that show still had.  In 2018 he would be replaced by Chuck Todd, who was just as terrible as Gregory in exactly the same way.     Todd would go on being an embarrassment to his profession for nine long years, until 2023, when they replaced him with  Kristen Welker, who is just as terrible as Gregory and Todd in exactly the same way.

So pardon me if I'm not shedding too many tears over what Bezos is doing to The Washington Post or Ellison is doing to CBS News.  Yes, it's terrible, but the legacy media was doing quite an efficient job of immolating themselves in a bonfire of cloistered arrogance long before Trump's billionaire button men showed up.  

Now that we've covered Bush making jokes about WMD at the White House Correspondent’s dinner during a time which our Never Trump friends desperately want us to remember as the Good Old Days of serious, cautious Republican leadership, don't forget that our Never Trump friends also would like us to remember that time as a period of Republican transparency.  None of this "hiding critical wartime information from the American public" nonsense.  And, of course, we are to believe that Republicans during this time were always respectful, never attacking or slandering their critics.  All of that is Trump stuff!   

Except is it?  Really?

From Democracy Now, March 26, 2004

Rice Agrees to Meet 9/11 Commission But Only in Private

After coming under intense criticism, the White House offered Thursday to have National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice meet again with the 9/11 Commission. But White House officials said she would appear only in private and not under oath.

Rice was the center of criticism during the recent 9/11 hearings for refusing to appear. Former Senator Bob Kerrey said “My gosh, I think she was on every single network the day the commission opened its hearing this week, attacking our witnesses.”

The New York Times also reports–almost in passing — that Rice is planning to leave her job at the end of the year.

Meanwhile the White House continued to attack former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke who is accusing the Bush administration of not heeding warnings before Sept. 11.

Senator Tom Daschle said “I have a simple request for the president today: Please ask the people around you to stop the character attacks they are waging against Richard Clarke. Ask them to stop their attempts to conceal information and confuse facts. Ask them to stop the long effort that has made the 9/11 commission’s work more difficult than it should be.”  

And of course you remember this.

So let’s compare Bush’s Iraq debacle with Trump’s Iran debacle.  The Good Old Days when Republicans were awesome, and the Bad New Days when Republicans are terrible.  

Lying us into war?  Check.

Claiming that we had no choice because the threat was imminent and terrifying?  Check.

Making up excuses after the fact?  Check.

Radically downplaying the downsides?  Overpromising and underdelivering?  Check and check.

Complete failure to prepare the public for what this war would really mean?  Check.

Keeping critical information from the public?  Check.

Slandering critics? Check.

Well, OK, but what about this?

From The New York Times, March 16, 2026:

With Threats and Claims of ‘Treason,’ Trump Pressures Media on the War

The Trump administration has unleashed a multifaceted pressure campaign against news organizations as it increasingly bristles at media coverage of a Middle East military operation that many Americans oppose.

Official Pentagon briefings now include attacks on outlets like CNN, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nit-picking headlines. President Trump is turning to his bully pulpit on Truth Social to accuse “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES” about the war and musing about “Charges for TREASON.”

The goal seems to be pressuring journalists to back off critical coverage of the war effort, or to at least encourage the public to second-guess reporting that runs counter to the administration’s preferred narrative. And the effort has gone well beyond words.

Mr. Trump’s top media regulator, Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, issued an explicit warning to broadcast television networks on social media, writing that “hoaxes and news distortions” could lead to the revocation of licenses for local stations, a threat that Mr. Trump said he was “so thrilled to see.”  

Surely there was no Bush administration equivalent of these attacks on the free press during the Before Time, right?

Well...

From The Brookings Institution, April 11, 2006:

Misplaced Blame: The Media’s Performance in Iraq

Throughout the Iraq war, the Bush administration has complained about the tenor of media coverage in Iraq. Paul Bremer did so during the first year of the American presence there, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as well as Vice President Dick Cheney make the point repeatedly. The complaint that we see only the bad news, not the good, has become increasingly prevalent within the U.S. armed forces as well.

…the broad argument by the American media’s critics is often badly overstated. While the overall image of Iraq conveyed by the mainstream media may be somewhat more negative than reality, it is not far off. If we lose in Iraq, it will most likely be because of events on the ground there, not a prematurely wavering political support here.

In fact, one can make a reasonable argument that the American public’s view on Iraq is just about where it should be given the facts. The public is enormously impressed by our troops, but depressed about the general lack of major progress on the ground and upset with the Bush administration for overpromising and underpreparing in regard to the war.

And then there is the filthy business of war profiteering.

From The Huffington Post, September 17, 2006:

Halliburton and Cheney: War Profiteers in Chief Fight to Keep Their Wallets Fat

Halliburton's stock has risen 200% since the invasion of Iraq three and a half years ago. David Lesar, its CEO, made over $40,000,000 in 2004 alone.

We all by now know that Dick Cheney retired from the Pentagon in 1993 to accede to the throne of Halliburton, an oil field services company based in Houston. After Mr. Cheney left Halliburton with tens of millions of dollars in his pocket largely earned because of his connections to Middle East dictators, Halliburton had to cough up $2.3 billion in cash, about $1.2 billion in stock and another $55 million in IOUs to help pay off the tens of thousands of people in this country who had suffered and/or died of asbestos poisoning at the hand of Dresser, which Mr. Cheney had acquired and for which Mr. Cheney was (and apparently still is) handsomely compensated. If this sounds a bit like Mr. Cheney's due diligence with respect to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it should. He never bothered to look at what Dresser had before he bought it for Halliburton and he never bothered to look at what Iraq had before he broke it for the U.S...

Until very recently, there has been relatively little penetration into the popular psyche of the role played by Halliburton in particular and other private military contractors in general. 

The reason is simple: the Bush Administration and its Congressional foot soldiers ranging from George Allen and John Warner of Virginia to Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania have refused at every turn to allow for any oversight at all, even though Democratic Senators have asked for such bi-partisan review for years. 

Of course, it’s still early days in Trump’s Iran Fiasco, but does anyone doubt with so much money sloshing around and so little oversight, that Trump and his mob of looters and plunderers will soon be stuffing their pockets as fast as possible?

From The New York Times, March 13, 2026:

 The Oil Tankers Trump Seized Are Costing the U.S. Millions of Dollars

Although President Trump said seizing tankers would be a financial boon, the cost of maintaining just one aging ship has already reached $47 million.

The seizures have put the U.S. government in a financial bind. The ships are highly expensive to maintain. And the Trump administration cannot legally sell the oil in these tankers without a judge’s permission.

Maintaining the seized tankers has already cost the United States tens of millions of dollars — in one case, $47 million in only three months — and complicates Mr. Trump’s claims of swift financial victories from his military operations targeting Venezuela and Iran.

From Time Magazine, March 19, 2026:

'It Takes Money to Kill Bad Guys': Trump's Iran War Set to Boost Profits For These Defense Contractors

Administration officials have signaled that Trump will soon request Congress approve tens of billions of dollars in supplemental funding to replenish U.S. weaponry supplies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on Thursday that the Pentagon had sent the White House a request $200 billion in additional funds, though he stressed that the figure "could move."

"It takes money to kill bad guys," Hegseth told reporters. "So we’re going back to Congress to ensure we’re properly funded, for what’s been done, what we may have to do in the future." He added that the money was needed to ensure that the country's stockpile of ammunition is "not just refilled, but above and beyond.” 

Then there is this depraved Trump-era innovation.  From The Atlantic, March 18, 2026:

Maybe Turning War Into a Casino Was a Bad Idea?

A disturbing new low in the Polymarket era

On March 10, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported on a missile that had been launched from Iran. The warhead hit an open area outside Jerusalem, which Fabian confirmed by speaking with rescue services and reviewing footage of the explosion. He wrote a short post on The Times of Israel’s live blog and moved on.

Meanwhile, gamblers had wagered millions on the unfolding events of the conflict. Fabian’s post became the subject of a major dispute on Polymarket, a popular prediction market where people can bet on the outcome of almost anything. The site had allowed users to guess when Iran would initiate “a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel’s soil”: More than $14 million was riding on whether such an attack had happened March 10.

People started reaching out asking Fabian to change his article. Some argued that Israel Defense Forces had not officially mentioned such an attack occurring on that day, and others said that the explosion he had reported was the result of a missile being intercepted, which according to Polymarket’s terms wouldn’t count as a strike “on Israel’s soil.” Confident in his reporting, Fabian did not amend the text. 

And just to button it up, let's go back to the promises these two Republican presidents made to the American people when they were candidates.

During the October 11, 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore, Republican candidate George W. Bush said this:

“If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us… Our nation stands alone right now in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble.”

And this: 

"I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.'"

24 years later, here is Republican candidate Donald Trump running for president: 

You see kids, Trump was not a break with the Republican past, he was a continuation of it: the end-state of a trajectory the GOP has been on for half a century.  

Of course the parallels aren’t exact, but if you put all of the malignant, corrupt, arrogant elements of the Bush administration's war with Iraq into a compression machine that would make it all bigger, faster, dumber, much louder and more reckless and with a giant, billionaire-backed hammer coming down on the media… you’d have Trump’s Iran War.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 978: WMD

"I think we agree, the past is over." --  George W. Bush, May 10, 2000

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One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

No, the difference is not the lies.  

All three of them were lying.  Reagan was lying after the fact.  Bush was lying before the invasion, laying the fraudulent predicate for it.  And Trump was lying in medias res, so to speak. 

But they're all liars.  Republican liars.

The difference is that Trump didn't have speechwriters like Landon Parvin (Reagan) and Michael Gerson (Bush) bending the language around to tailor those lies for general public consumption.

Burn The Lifeboats

Now Watch This Drive

From The Daily Beast:

Trump Brags to Golf Buddy About His War as Americans Die

No Half Meaures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 929: Republicans Can't Get No Satisfaction

"The poorest 20 percent (you can argue with the number — 10 percent? 18 percent? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn’t leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn’t be able to get out. The resources — meaning, the political will — weren’t there to get them out." -- From an email attributed to a Katrina recue worker.  

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