Hey Fellow Kidz, Here’s a Cool New Idea That No One Has Ever Thought of Before!

We'll put on our own show!

 

Minus the blackface of course.

 

'Cause all we need is pluck, and spunk, and a little elbow grease and we can put on a show that'll blow the socks of these rubes!  Then we'll have enough money to save all parent's houses from foreclosure, and won't that be a fine thing!

In case you are unfamiliar, this plot was a Depression-era staple, usually starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.  And during the Depression, I imagine it was a balm to the despairing masses -- to being able to get away from the desperation of real life for an hour and a half and imagine that putting on a show with some old costumes found in a steamer truck, staged in somebody's uncle's barn with a few song-and-dance numbers written for the occasion would save the day.  

With that in mind, we will now go to Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post,  mere days ago in an exercise which, in my previous life, I have referred to in many, many meetings as the "All quarterbacks/ No wide receivers" school of management.   In this scenario, senior management sits around a large table at their weekly, well-catered meeting and spitball about stuff they want.  Stuff they'd like to see happen, or outcomes they'd like to see achieved.  It's all just wishcasting, with everyone trying to outbid everyone else with the awesomeness of their Wish List: a Wish List which some unspecified person or persons is/are excepted to take up and complete at some point .

Eventually, with all the wishing done (and the ritual complaints about the availability of parking and state of the break room are completed) the meeting adjourns and everyone (except me) leaves feeling a warm glow of accomplishment.  That something had definitely been decided upon (it hadn't.)   That plans had been laid (they weren't.) And that this plan had been delegated to ... someone (Nope.)

A few weeks later, some member of this brain trust remembers one of the wishes which had been spoken aloud to the cosmos and the boss asks the group where that thing stood.  Eyes flash around the room, and even though everyone is seated, everyone manages to slowly take a step backwards.  This is followed by a lot of ponderous or grouchy harrumphing, but the issue gradually dissipates into a welter of disappointed and "Why does nothing every get done around here?" harrumphs, and the cycle repeats itself. 

From the WaPo:

Democrats need to reclaim reality from the right-wing disinformation machine

Disinformation has taken hold over democracy.

Whether you believe that Americans embraced President-elect Donald Trump’s misogynistic, racist and bullying persona because they misunderstood what he stood for or because they liked what he stood for; or because they believed (falsely) that the economy was in a recession or because they could not afford to buy their own home; or because of some combination of all of these, we cannot ignore the success of the right-wing media’s disinformation network in shaping how millions of Americans view the country.

Yes, Jen.  Thank you for joining the chat that the rest of us have been engaged in for +20 years.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer put it succinctly:

The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday ... all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.

Yes, Jen.  We know.  We get it.  We, too, have been putting this succinctly, and angrily, and despairingly, and TL:DR-ingly on our blogs and podcasts and Tweets and newsletters and TikToks and YouTubes and screaming it across the table at family gatherings. 

A now much-discussed Reuters-Ipsos poll found that...

Lemme guess.  Reuters-Ipsos poll confirms what we have been saying for decades.  We know.  We get it.  

The media preferences of millions of fellow Americans...

...are fucked-in-the-head because they are soaking in Conservative propaganda 24/7.   We know.  We get it.  Are we going to get around to proposing a practical, viable solution anytime soon?

On views about inflation and the overall economy, people in 2024 consistently reported very negative opinions compared to actual inflation, unemployment, and GDP figures...

So no.  I guess we're just going to keep padding out this column with stuff everyone already knows.

Europeans have been especially perplexed by American’s sour views of the economy...

More padding..

On the eve of the general election, the Economist magazine even had a cover story saying the U.S. economy was the envy of the world. Yet voters...

Well golly, Jen, you've finally convinced me.  This all sounds bad.  So...whatever exactly are we supposed to do about it.

The answer to combating the avalanche of disinformation...

Hurrah!  The word "answer" has finally appeared on the horizon!  How exciting!  So go ahead.  Dazzle me.

Oopsie.  Spoke too soon.  Still more Jensplaining to us things we already know about and have spilled a million pixels writing about since the dawn of blogging.  

The answer to combating the avalanche of disinformation, sadly, does not reside primarily in legacy media, which millions upon millions of Americans never see or read. (It certainly does not reside in outlets that offered false equivalence, failed to oppose a fascist candidate, or ignored voters’ lack of interest in democracy and underlying resentment over the loss of White power.) 

Touchingly honest: a WaPo editorial writer telling us her platform and her profession are a dead loss, but still, nothing we did not already know.

Then more yadda yadda yadda.

Then comes two sentences, written in the passive voice, explaining to us rubes what must be done to solve our fatal national journalism problem.

Are you ready?

Are you ready?

Ok, here we go:

Rather, the solution lies largely in fostering new forms of media to counteract the gusher of right-wing disinformation that fills the brains and shapes the attitudes of many Americans.

And

A new crop of relevant opinion makers, local media and investigative journalists is required to get basic information to voters and combat the right’s conspiracy-laden hysteria. Then democracy and good governance stand a fighting chance...

Hey look kids!  Big Time WaPo opinion-haver Jennifer Rubin is of the opinion that we need a Liberal media.

Huzza!

And what she is very carefully not saying is that the Left was right all along.  

Not a word about the who, what, when, where or how -- and who's gonna pay for -- this  "new crop of relevant opinion makers".  Not a word about all the Liberal bloggers and podcasts and Utne Reader and The New Republic writers and Air America veterans who have gone gray in the service of trying to build just such a Liberal media from scratch without the billions that right wing billionaires were willing to lavish on Conservative media to build the vast propaganda machine that produced the likes of [checks notes] Jennifer Rubin.

Not a word about the coordinated mockery, dismissal and attacks from legacy media and Conservative against any hint of Liberalism that might threaten to break into the mainstream.

Instead Rubin advises that someone, somewhere should manifest such a thing somehow.  

Should, y'know, make it so.

Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time a Liberal has cried out for a genuinely Liberal media over the past 20 years...I'd have nearly enough cabbage to fund a genuinely Liberal media.

But now, last last, Jennifer Rubin has arrived to explain this to us as if 'twere something fresh and new.

Time to take Jennifer Rubin in back and plug her into the hyperdrive.

I Am The Liberal Media

March 2024 Jennifer Rubin Is Now Fully April 2012 Norm Ornstein

From The Brookings Institute, April 27, 2012:

Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem

[by] Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein

...

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition...

The Washington Post, yesterday:

Forget ‘polarization.’ It’s the GOP’s radicalization.

By Jennifer Rubin

The notion that the United States is “polarized” into two conflicting, equally stubborn and extreme camps infects much of the mainstream news coverage and everyday chatter about politics. Washington is “broken.” “Gridlock” is a problem. “No one goes out to dinner with someone on the other side.” Such mealy-mouthed language masks a stark dichotomy: Democrats have to move to the center to get bipartisan support; Republicans have become radicalized and unmovable.

This is not “polarization.” It is the authoritarian capture of much of the GOP by a right-wing movement bent on sowing chaos...

And this completes that particular circle.

Powerful and completely accurate @JRubinBlogger . Should be read by all journalists, especially editors, and reporters at the Post, the Times, AP and CNN. And points out how devious and pernicious is No Labels. https://t.co/yMOLXYnhRO

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) March 10, 2024

Good to see Rubin catching up to where Norm was 12 years ago, and where the Left was decades ago, back when even whispering such thoughts was the darkest heresy.  However, ultimately none of this will matter very much.  

There just aren't any minds left to be persuaded on the Right.  And Centrists are just as pot-committed to their poisonous cult of Both Sides Do It as the Right are pot-committed to their Orange Rapist Fascist Daddy.  It's just that, in the case of pathological Centrists, virtually the entire mainstream news media are members of that cult, so they use their their position occupying the commanding heights of the normie media to camouflaged their weirdo fetish as "objective" and "normal". 

See also The New York Times every fucking day.

 

I Am The Liberal Media

America's Pissiest Neocon Is Mad At The Conservative Cyborg Sent From The Future To Destroy America

Professional Conservative lunatic Ms. Jennifer Rubin (one of the many neocon throw-pillows with which Fred Hiatt decorates the op-ed page of the Washington Post) has a bone to pick with Professional Conservative lunatic and inexplicably NBC starting player, Hugh Hewitt.  

Which itself is delightful because what's more fun that hearing Conservative lunatic mommy and daddy screaming at each other through the wall?

But what makes it extra special is how Ms. Rubin had to go deep diving into the middle of worst foreign policy debacle in modern American history -- a disaster that virtually every other Conservative is desperate to forget, but which she ecstatically endorsed and which only she and nine other refugees from the Project for a New American Century still stand by -- to find the perfect metaphor for Mr. Hewitt's heresies:

Baghdad Bob of the week

By Jennifer Rubin August 12 at 9:15 AM

This week there was one standout for “Baghdad Bob,” our Republican of the week who most embarrassed himself in shameful spinning and toadying to Donald Trump.

Hugh Hewitt,  in an “interview” worthy of Sean Hannity, tried to save Trump from himself during a radio interview, but to no avail...

Scene:  Conservative Brain (Interior)

Baghdad Bob?  Why does that name sound so familiar?  Oh, yeah! I remember. Hahaha! Jeez, that guy was the lying asshole of the century wasn't he?  Hey, does anyone remember what were we doing in Baghdad anywa...?
Oh shit...  Thanks a lot J-Rub!

You say "Baghdad Bob".  I say "Ari Fleischer".  See how much fun we can have with Operation Enduring Free Association?

Next up:  Is Donald Trump Sean Hannity's Katrina?

Jennifer Rubin: Frisson Accomplished

Ms. Jennifer Rubin (one of the many neocon throw-pillows with which Fred Hiatt decorates the op-ed page of the Washington Post) decided to tarry along the way to her upteenth "OMFG! The Republican Party is full of Republicans!" column --

As for the right-wing groups, publications and other enablers who went the extra mile (and around the bend) for Trump, there is no reason Republicans hereafter should listen to them, send them money or include them in discussions about the future of the party. Really, does any Republican think Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani will have any credibility after November?

-- just long enough to re-litigate the Iraq War:

Not just Clinton, but scores of Senate and House Democrats in contested primaries had to rebut attacks from the left that they were snookered by the Bush administration or war mongers. Given the conclusion of every Western intelligence agency that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the attacks were unfair and over the top.

Oh honey, it is just adorable how you still parade around in public in your rotting "Mission Accomplished!" prom dress, but honestly, outside of the Fox News spider-hole and Fred Hiatt's neocon tree-fort there is virtually nobody left in the GOP who wants to wear that fucking albatross around their necks. 

Or maybe you didn't notice that one of the siege weapons Donald J. Trump used to destroy Mister Low Energy Man's future in the Republican Party was a very large "The Iraq War Was A Giant Fuck-Up" freeze ray with which he shot into Mister Low Energy Man;s face over and over again:

Of course Trump is lying about his support of the Iraq War just as he lies about everything else, but he knows what his wingnut legions want to hear: that the Bush's Operation Endless Clusterfuck was debacle based on lies for which, somehow, despite cheering for it, voting for it and calling its opponents "traitors" for year, they are in no way responsible.

Which is what makes Ms. Rubin's headline such a tiny gem of clueless Beltway inbreeding:

Will Trump be Republicans’ Iraq War vote?

No, J-Rub, the Republican's Iraq War vote has become the "Republican's Iraq War". 

Because as I explained back in 2009, since the collapse of the Bush Administration, the base of the Republican party -- like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin -- have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms, re-brand themselves as Tea Partiers, and fall into the arms of the Burnt Orange Fascist of their dreams.  

6th Circle of Hell Thought-Leader Calls Out 9th Circle of Hell Thought-Leaders

As you probably already know, Ms. Jennifer Rubin (one of the many neocon throw-pillows with which Fred Hiatt decorates the op-ed page of the Washington Post) has recently been stunned to discover that her Republican party is full of... Republicans!

Shitty, shitty Republicans.

Neither Pence nor Gingrich is going to help Trump
...
Trump, then, has the opportunity to demonstrate his judgment is just as horrible as his critics say by picking Gingrich. He alternatively can pick someone, who by many voters’ reckoning, would be far superior to him for the presidential slot. He could always pick someone else entirely (the compliant New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie). But let’s remember: This is akin to picking the pattern for the drapes on the Titanic. No VP pick can compensate for Trump’s glaring weaknesses.

Heartbreaking, I know.

But now that she has gotten over her initial shock, J-Rub has a plan.  She and a handful of noble Conservative Never Trump thought leaders will wait out the end of the world and then, after the smoke clears and the dust settles and the cliches are boxed back up again, will emerge from their hideaway and take over the world:

It is nevertheless telling that the most impressive Republicans and military vets whose names have been bandied about want no part of the Trump circus. They are smart enough to know that the ticket in all likelihood will lose and that the association with Trump will be a career-ender. It will be conservatives who declined to run or even endorse Trump who will gain the admiration of their fellow Republicans and keep their political futures alive.

Which, now that I think about it, sounds remarkably like this guy's plan for "Helter Skelter":

One hundred forty-four thousand would be the membership of the Family when, in Helter Skelter's aftermath, it would emerge from "the bottomless pit" to rule. "It would be our world then. There would be no one else, except for us and the black servants."

Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Jennifer Rubin

Having laid on second and third shifts of deep core miners to uncover the #NeverTrump pony she just knows must be at the bottom of Trump shitpile. Ms. Jennifer Rubin (one of the many neocon throw-pillows with which Fred Hiatt decorates the op-ed page of the Washington Post) has also accidentally discovered a terrible thing.

The Republican party is full of Republicans.

And a whole lot of those Republicans are -- spoiler! -- awful, shitty, bigoted morons.

It is really quite remarkable.

From the Washington Post:

...

One, therefore, is left with an unpleasant reality: A plurality of GOP voters wanted Trump. They did not care or may have actively embraced his lunacy, bigotry and ignorance. His rotten character and abject honesty elicited shrugs. They wore his “pants on fire” fact checks like badges of honor. A significant segment of the GOP primary electorate itself lacked common sense, standards of decency, and intolerance of bigotry and cruelty. No group was worse than the evangelical “leaders” who cheered him along the way.

A Republican wag joked that the GOP needs not only a new candidate but also a new base. There is something to that. In the 2016 postmortem, it will be worth examining the extent to which the GOP has promoted crackpots, become ghettoized in distorted right-wing media and lost track of what 21st-century America believes and looks like. That suggests conservative “leaders” need to do more leading, and less following, and the party as a whole has to expand its vision and its base. It’s time to stop reveling in ignorance and celebrating lost causes.

Barry Goldwater’s widow was recently quoted as saying, “Barry would be appalled by Mr. Trump’s behavior — the unintelligent and unfiltered and crude communications style. And he’s shallow — so, so shallow.” She continued, “Barry was so true to his convictions and would never be issuing these shallow, crude, accusatory criticisms of the other party or the other person.” She’s right, of course. And yet the GOP primary electorate did not see all that. It’s a problem when the rest of the country has to rescue the GOP and the country from Republican voters’ terrible judgment.

Wow.

So then what happened, Unca Driftglass?  Did she hand in her resignation and leave the pundit business to search for a body of water large enough to wash the blood from her own hands?

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

Did this public confession that the Left has been speaking nothing but the unvarnished truth about the Right result in a sudden uptick in Liberals hires among the nation's newspapers?

Are any Conservatives anywhere lining up to offer a simple apology for slandered and demonized us dirty hippies for the unforgivable sin of telling the truth?

Are any of them planning to make amends for making a living -- often a very good living -- by lying about us decade after decade?

Oh good God no.

That is not not how these people roll.  

To Save The Republican Party, Jennifer Rubin Demands The Ideological Self-Deportation Of The Entire Republican Party

The Republican Party has been an open sewer of lunatics, racists and treasonous running dogs for year.

But only recently has this fact begun to irritate the yappiest neoconservative troll in Fred Hiatt's Bush Regime Dead-Ender Safe House.  So, in typical Jennifer Rubin fashion, Ms. Rubin has elevated her hero Mitt Romney's asinine "self-deportation" idea to new, and ideologically-unheard-of heights.  In order to spare her further embarrassment, the entire Republican Party must immediately repudiate the entire Republican Party.

Immediately!

From the WaPo:

No matter how many Republicans denounce Trump, the racism charge sticks

By Jennifer Rubin June 9 at 9:00 AM

...

Republicans may protest and condemn Trump’s comments all they like, but for every denunciation, a Republican surrogate offers up some contorted defense. And Republicans keep Trump as their nominee. Trump’s racist and misogynistic rhetoric makes him toxic to women and minorities, and it risks tarring the party for years.

...

In short, a bad rap (Republicans’ opposition to the liberal agenda makes them racists) has been turned into an accurate, deadly analysis. (Too many Republicans harbor bigoted views of minorities and/or do not recognize racism when it’s in front of them.) Not all Republicans can be labeled as such, but far too many. The solution only comes with repudiation of Trump, success of diverse candidates and an empathetic agenda that demonstrates Republicans care about all Americans, not just rich, white males.

It is that problem that now hangs over the GOP. It’s why the GOP is likely to lose the presidential race and perhaps one or more houses of Congress. It is why many will conclude it is better to scrap the party and start anew. Ironically, they may have to kill off the party of Lincoln to save the spirit of Lincoln.

It was never a "bad rap", Ms. Rubin.  It was just another one of those inconvenient truth about your party that you and so many others have profited so handsomely from lying about, over and over and over again.

Also, it continues to be a source of cheap and bitter amusement to me that professional Beltway toads like Ms. Rubin continue making a living by eventually being forces grudgingly around to poaching their analysis and metaphors --

Ironically, they may have to kill off the party of Lincoln to save the spirit of Lincoln.

-- from from their betters long after their betters have seen right past their scrim of bullshit and defection to the ugly truth that they are trying so desperately to hide (from me in January in a post about Republican Detachment Disorder sufferer, David Frum):

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,..