Professional Left Podcast #110

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

-- John F. Kennedy

Da' money goes here:

Then War Broke Out in Republican Heaven

Willard and his plunderfuck money fought against the Newt, and the Newt and his casino-money fought back.

-- Revelation 12:7 (St. Ronald Reagan edition)

This is Newt Gingrich's half-hour beatdown documenting Willard Romney's years of soulless rapacity sowing his wild LBOs and playing Dread Pirate Roberts at Bain Capital.

I have had two whole careers shot out from under me by plunderfucks like Romney (and one career incinerate by the Romney mentality running through the existing management like a staph infection.)

The only advice I can humbly offer when dealing with them is, whenever possible, follow the first and most ancient rule of fighting vampires: never, ever invite one in the door.

Launch of a New Magazine: Take One

 A Professional Left Joint.

The Little Boy

Who never grew up.

I feel for the young boy Mr. Sullivan used to be (as described in this video.)

I too was a gifted kid who got stomped by the system (in my case I ran head first into a teacher who was a sadist and a school system which all but encouraged bullying because they were embedded in a community full of hyper-aggressiveness, hyper-competitive young executives, all on the fast track up, or on the fast track down.  The indifferent administrators and laughably inadequate "gifted" programs would come later...)

But to harbor that resentment all these years? To haul it all the way across the Atlantic ocean and project it onto another country and culture -- a country and culture which you clearly did not and not understand? And to get that transposition so dangerously, backwardly wrong?

This is what I cannot get past.

America was never England, Mr. Sullivan, and our Liberals and Democrats were not the Labor Party when it came to education or anything else.

In this country, it was not the Left who closed schools down to keep gifted outsiders from succeeding: it was a group of powerful Southern Democrats who, once upon a time and in pursuit of the very Conservative idea of maintaining the social order and stability of their racist society, wrapped bigotry up in a Bible to keep African Americans subjugated.

This they did in the name of Almighty God.

To keep their way of life alive and African Americans subjugated, these same people used the same bigotry, wrapped in the same Bible and cited the authority of the same Almighty God to justify forging themselves into an aggregate paleo-fascist entity called the Confederacy, which seceding from the country and made bloody civil war on its neighbors.

Did your gifted school mention any of this when they were teaching you world history?

Did they bother to teach you that, having lost that bloody civil war, these same, damned people merely shifted from outright slavery to a system of brutal apartheid enforced by state-sanctioned terrorism to keep their way of life alive and African Americans subjugated?  That they justified it all once again using the same bigotry, wrapped in the same Bible and citing the authority of the same Almighty God?

Did they teach you that this depravity never went away?

That in America it has been passed from generation to generation like hemophilia?

That one of the "To Do" items on the very top of their list was to deny anything remotely resembling a decent public education to non-Whites, gifted or not?

That these are the people who redubbed themselves "Dixiecrats".  Who opened hundreds of "segregation academies" to keep their children hating the way they were supposed to.  Who rigged up property laws, election laws, marriage laws and state constitutions to deny, cripple and oppress non-Whites.  Who took the old Confederate battle flag out of the museum and incorporated into their state flags just to scream "Fuck You!" at the forces of justice and modernity a little bit louder.

I guess your school skipped all that.  Otherwise you certainly would have learned that the direct, lineal descendants of the proud practitioners of this Bible-wrapped bigotry migrated en masse into the  Conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Migrated en masse because they were invited by the leaders of the Conservative movement and the Republican Party to do so.

This is all happened, by the way, at around the same time you were getting out of diapers.

So how the hell did you miss it?

How in the hell did virtually all of Conservatism's leading public intellectuals fail to notice that these very people still grimly carry on their centuries-old struggle  to use the terrible power of government to oppress, thwart and cripple the groups they hate.  That they are defined by their hatred?  What whole religions, media empires depend on that hatred?

That your entire movement, Mr. Sullivan, long ago came to depend on that hatred?  A movement you crossed an ocean to join, and to which you have have devoted most of your adult life?

Honest to Christ, Mr. Sullivan, some day I really would like at least one of you Conservative exiles and expats to spend 1/100th of the effort you devote to parsing Ron Paul's latest verbal tic and give an honest answer this simple question:  How did some of Conservatism's leading public intellectuals get something this fundamental so massively wrong?  Is it a cognitive disorder?  Were you just that blind?  Or was it for the money?

Because it wasn't the those terrible Liberals who pulled their children out of American public schools rather than let the Socialist Kenyan Usurper "indoctrinate " their minds with his sinister "Orwellian" message of "Stay in school and do your homework".

No, as usual it was the brain caste of American Conservatism who dreamed up that bit of racist bilge, just as it was, once again, the rank-and-file of that movement who obediently lined up to hate whoever their leaders told them to hate.




It was, in other words, exactly the same sort of people who have been the heart of the Right since long before you joined their team.

How did you miss that?

The Mote in Bobo's Eye

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

-- Matthew 7:5

Begin first with this understanding; Mr. Brooks is a Professional Conservative.

Without that one pony to ride, Mr. Brooks has nothing.

Nothing at all.

Which is why, Mr. Brooks, Professional Conservative, has written another 800-word column for the New York Times about Liberals.

 In this column, Mr. Brooks:

1. Wonders aloud why nobody like Liberals. 
2. Puts the entire burden for fixing everything that is broken in America on the back of Liberals. 
3. Suggests that the very first thing Liberals need to do to fix what is wrong with America is to stop everything and purify Liberalism. 

Even though he has demonstrate over and over again in great detail how embarrassingly little he knows about Real Liberals and (conversely) how much of his writing is driven by an obsession with the same Imaginary Liberals which live under Rush Limbaugh's bed, Mr. Brooks nonetheless continues to write frequently -- compulsively -- about us.

Continues to make a princely living telling tale tales about Liberals and hippies and 1960s.

Like his writings on economics and history, most of what Mr. Brooks writes about Liberals is not simply wrong, but always wrong in exactly the same way. All sifted through a corrupt ideological filter which prevents Mr. Brooks from coming to terms with the fact that every problem he identifies has either been created by or made vastly worse by the diligent application of his own ideology.

Or, more simply, Mr. Brooks cannot write honestly about what is wrong with America because Mr. Brooks is what's wrong with America.

That being said, let us poke a stick into today's fresh helping of mire and see what oozes out.

First, Mr. Brooks assertion that nobody like Liberals.

Why aren’t there more liberals in America?


It’s not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.  

...

Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal...

Mr. Brooks never bothers to cite any sources for his assertions about how or why American's identify themselves with this or that label, and this graph from Pew explains why.

Because if you simply substitute the word "Progressive" for the nearly-identical word "Liberal" (which the Right has spent billions demonizing) Mr. Brooks' entire argument collapses.

Mr. Brooks' third observation -- that the "solution" to a the nonexistent problem is the mortification of the Liberal flesh, the purification of the Liberal ideal --

..Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping carbuncles off the state.


Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn’t you?


In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run.


Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.


Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.


If you’ll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It’s not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.

-- is equally absurd not because the Liberal stables don't need cleaning, but because of the idea that we should turn our attention to cleaning out those stables in the middle of a pitched battle as the wingnut hordes are swarming us with bayonettes fixed is suicidal.

No, amid our many problems, Conservatism stands out as American democracy's Number One massive, sucking chest wound.  The top of the triage list.  And the first civic duty of every public-spirited Liberal must be to hasten the extinction of the Modern Conservative Movement, which is a project that must begin in the Center.

The reason Modern Conservatism was not laughed off the stage decades ago is that it is willing to drop a 16 ton weight on anyone in the media who refused to treat it with respectful seriousness. The Right -- with its legions of bigots, buffoons, Bible thumpers and billionaires -- gets its every Bronze Age theory and popskull proclamation treated with the utmost seriousness because the mainstream media is terrified to do otherwise.

Because news is a commodity, and the Right has convinced the Mainstream Media that it can cut them off at the wallet if they speak out of turn.

And so, behind the shriveled figleaf of objectivity, the Right is permitted to do and say anything no matter how traitorous, destructive or loony while from the Center we get nothing but the mantra of "Both Sides Do It" repeated forever and ever and ever.

Which is not only morally offensive, but also the proximate cause of exactly the kind of public mistrust of government which Mr. Brooks pretends to care about:

...Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.


A few decades ago they did, but now they don’t. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.


Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged.

The public distrusts government because they have been told by the very same fuckers who clubbed the media to its knees that the government was their Enemy.  Not the imperfect manifestation of the will of a conflicted people, but a force for Evil constructed by Liberals to destroy them,  And every time those fuckers got hold of the keys to the government they chopped it for parts, sugared the gas tank, slashed the tires, set what was left on fire and then rolled the burning hulk  off the nearest cliff to demonstrate that -- See! See! -- that thing was not safe at all!

So, strike two for Mr. Brooks.

On the other hand, I do happen to agree with Mr. Brooks that Liberals have not been taking sufficient, intelligent action on our own behalf.

Of course, the irony of Mr. Brooks calling for a sense of bravery and purpose which he himself complete lacks is not lost on me -- that when it came to bearing any of the cost or responsibility for his war of choice, the economic disasters his ideology has wrought, or the toxic disaster his party has made of Washington D.C., Mr. Brooks has made a career of excusing himself to the Reasonable Centrist bathroom and then crawling out window whenever another Republican butcher's bill comes due.

However the fact that Mr. Brooks is a coward and a fraud does not mean that Liberals are not occasionally, ridiculously self-defeating.

Yes, we fight for Big Principles, but too often we also let the "narcissism of small differences" turn relatively minor differences into full-on range wars.  I have walked away from Liberal organizations more than once because they failed completely in their primary duty:  getting out of their own way long enough to do the good they all said they believed in doing.

We can also be very bad at communicating. Yes, we are quite good at semaphoring to each other in the language of graphs, policy prescriptions and eyerolls at the latest Republican perfidy, but often we just suck at street fighting. Quit waving charts at the muggles and expecting them to change their minds! You have to be able to connect with people emotionally. You have to explain to people why they should care in the language the respect and understand. And frankly you have to be able to reach into a Conservative's chest cavity and rip out his heart: our current situation requires it and we are all too often  insufficiently competent at delivering it.

We are also cheap fuckers (a theme I heard over and over again at Netroots Nation.)  I'm not talking about the rank and file -- not the people who are barely scraping by, who write to Blue Gal and me every day, who drop us a fiver they can't afford "thank you" notes that blows us away. No, I'm talking about Liberals with very, very deep pockets. The ones on Obama's platinum donor list. The ones who kick it at Davos. Who spend summer on the French Riviera and winters in St. Moritz and who are cheap fuckers when it comes to building the institutions on which a movement depends.

The Right beat us into a corner because they were willing to spend without limit, decade after decade after decade. Willing to spend whatever it took to build political think tanks and interlocking media empires which all geared to pour continuous hellfire onto the word "Liberal".

And it worked.

We, on the other hand, couldn't manage to keep the Koufax Awards going. 

Jon Huntsman's Rambling, OediPAC-Funded Mess of a Speech

In 90 seconds.

GOP Temporarily Tires of Masturbating

With its non-dominant hand.


From NBC:

NBC projects Romney wins N.H. primary

Updated at 8:00 p.m. ET MANCHESTER, N.H. – Mitt Romney is projected to win the New Hampshire primary, scoring a decisive victory for the former Massachusetts governor in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Also the Amazing Invisible Libertarian tricks the media into once again paying fleeting, grudging attention to him by placing second (projected).

Gone Today, Here Tomorrow

Scientists fiddle around with cool shit.

From "National Geographic":

"Time Cloak" Created; Can Make Events Disappear
Experiment is first to make a hole in time, expert says.

Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News Published January 4, 2012

Einstein's theories of relativity suggest that gravity can cause time to slow down. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to stop time altogether—or at least, to give the appearance of time stopping by bending light to create a hole in time.

The new research builds on recent demonstrations of "invisibility cloaks" that can make objects seem to disappear by bending waves of visible light.

The idea is that, if light moves around an object instead of striking it, that light doesn't get scattered and reflected back to an observer, making the object essentially invisible.

Now Cornell University scientists have used a similar concept to create a hole in time, albeit a very short one: The effect lasts around 40 trillionths of a second. ...

Making Time Stand Still

To conduct their time-stopping experiment, described this week in the journal Nature, [study co-author and Cornell physicist Alex] Gaeta and colleagues aimed a laser beam at a probe and passed the beam through a device called a time lens.

While a conventional optical lens bends a beam of light in space, the time lens modifies the light's temporal—not spatial—distribution.

"It's a way of being able to really control the properties of a light beam in the time domain, and shape and distort and do funny things like this to light in the time domain," Gaeta said.

Study co-author Moti Fridman, also of Cornell University's School of Applied and Engineering Physics, devised a method in which he crossed the laser beam aimed at the probe with a strong "pulse" laser inside specialized fiber optic glass.

"This changed the frequency and wavelength of the beam so it moved at a different velocity, and this is why a [time] gap was created," he explained.

A second pulse laser on the other side of the time hole reversed the changes, restoring the beam to its original properties.

In the experiment, an event that happened inside the time hole wasn't detected by the probe.
...

As insanely cool as this all is (and it is) the scientists conducting the research seem strangely unaware that others have been working along parallel lines for years.

In fact just recently a well-funded outfit called "The GOP" made a unit of time known in temporal legerdemain circles term as "Every fucking thing before January 20, 2009" completely disappear without a single "time lens", "flux capacitor" or any other of your fancy-schmancy "science".

Instead they used money. Lots and lots and lots of money. Enough money to bend spacetime, the memories of millions of Americans and will of thousands of media executives.

Of course, there were a few, terrifying side-effects...

No Wonder You're Feeling Tired

On the one hand, yes, there are substantial omissions.

On the other hand, rare is the post -- no matter how exhaustive -- that doesn't have at least one "But you forgot..." somewhere in the first three comments.

The Award for "Best NH Debate Post Title"

Must go to Jurrasicpork at Brilliant at Breakfast for "Last Night's NH Debate: Live Free or Die of Embarrassment".

The writing is also up to the job:

...
Willard, leader of the rat hordes, is da Man. Meet your new 2012 Republican Car to Nowhere.

There was no Night of Long Knives or even a Dusk of Apple Paring Knives. Newt and the others, save possibly for Jon Huntsman in this, his Brian's Song of a national appearance, went after Willard with about as much real zeal as so many crocodiles recently bloated with baby hippos would look at a full-grown hippo. Huntsman did channel Herbert Hoover by muttering something to Willard in Mandarin Chinese, which came off sounding like a chess nerd explaining the Sicilian trap to a bunch of football jocks just before they folded him six ways into a locker.
...

Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. *

In case you were wondering, every time I hear or see or read the same, lavishly remunerated sock puppets jackhammering home the same, patently false Centrist narrative for the umpteen millionth time from impregnable media fortress that reach several million more people a week than I ever have or ever will, this is what it sounds like to me:

From "Brave New World":

"What's the lesson this afternoon?" he asked. 

 "We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answered. "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness."

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.

"Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet."

At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

There was a pause; then the voice began again.

"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"

The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.

"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."

Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida–wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.

"The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."

The students took it down in their little books. Straight from the horse's mouth.

Once more the Director touched the switch.

"… so frightfully clever," the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying, "I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because …"

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too–all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides–made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!" The Director almost shouted in his triumph. "Suggestions from the State." He banged the nearest table. "It therefore follows …"

As corrupt and crippled as our politics has become, our system still demands that, every few years, the people who make our laws undergo a certain amount of scrutiny and an up-or-down hiring decision by the people they propose to represent.

But as you may have noticed, that scrutiny is now routinely bent out of shape -- so wildly distorted that on any give day all we seem to have is a choice of poisons; a fire-hose of relentless Conservative lies, irrelevant trivia, breathless horse-race gibberish, poll number recitations and 30 second ads.

And that is because the deciders who dictate the parameters of that political discussion -- the Villagers who conspire to whisper "I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki." into our nation's ears a hundred times a day from a dozen angles -- are themselves almost never scrutinized and held to account at all.

If they were, I would happily walk away from blogging tomorrow because if they were people David Brooks would never be able to keep his day job after going on Hate Radio to put Barack Obama on the couch



barely four-months after an ambarassing, tearful, emo public breakup

with That Man from Chicago...

...and barely a week after finding public solace in the arms of a 15th century calificador working for the American branch of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.


* (from "1984")

Happy Birthday Mr. Bowie

And many more.

Bouphonia Reminds All Randites

to "Protect the Queen!".

Of course the author does not get around to property rebuking us Manichean zealots until Update II:

This robotic devotion of literally brainless shills to falsehood and viciousness not merely as political tactics, but as supreme ends in themselves, is the litmus test that distinguishes the Obama era's ever-dwindling authentic humanity from hyperpartisan personality cultists.

Or cleverly unearthing our real motivations until Update IV:

...manifestly the mere delusions of situational ethicists who literally wallow in the entrails of the foreign babies they murdered by proxy for the greater glory of the assassins who slaughtered these innocents in their name? All one can hope is that if these cultist shills can't bring themselves to agree with me when circumstances ineluctably demand it, they can at least be honest about their motivations.

Still, as I sit here full of remorseful shameliness at my wallowy Manicheanism, my suddenly resurgent conscience ineluctably demands that I salute the effort :-)

Conservativism is Pro Same-Sex Marriage

Because Andrew Sullivan says it is:

Dear David

My friend David Brooks writes the following:

I’m to Rick Santorum’s left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion.

No, no, no. David is to Santorum's right on both issues, if left and right retain any meaning. Same-sex marriage is arguably the most successful socially conservative reform ever, as Conor Friedersdorf notes...

Mr. Sullivan is a gay Catholic Tory who has built an entire career carrying water for the Conservative Movement.

The Conservative Movement is fueled by people who really hate people like Mr. Sullivan.

Because the  Conservative Movement is fueled by people who really hate him, Mr. Sullivan has invented a wholly fake history of the Conservative Movement to explain away his delusional, self-contradicting bullshit.

One of Mr. Sullivan's pet projects has been spending much of the last three years castigating a woman named Sarah Palin for making up wholly fake history of Conservative Movement to explain away her delusional, self-contradicting bullshit.

One of the side effects of Mr. Sullivan's delusional, self-contradicting bullshit is that he has been rendered incapable of understanding why this is hilarious.

Sad, really, but not in any way career-limiting because Andrew Sullivan has internalized the only important lesson in pundit social climbing:  always, always, always kiss up --

I found the rest of the [David Brooks] column, by the way, surpassingly sane.

and punch down.

Grandpa Walnuts Phones It In

From ABC News:

John McCain Continues to Do Mitt Romney’s Dirty Work, Hits Rick Santorum on Earmark Spending

On his second day as a member of Team Romney, Sen. John McCain continued to assail former Sen. Rick Santorum for supporting so-called “pork barrel spending.”

“Believe me, earmark spending is the gateway to corruption, and that was practiced when Republicans were in the majority,” said McCain, R-Ariz. “Sen. Santorum and I have a strong disagreement, a strong disagreement that he believes that earmark and pork barrel projects were good for America.

“I think it’s wrong for America and so does Sen. [Jim] DeMint and so does Sen. Lindsey Graham who have been staunch fighters against earmark and pork barrel spending,” said McCain, evoking the names of two of South Carolina’s senators. “And I know you’re proud of that.”

Because when will I ever get another chance to recycle this graphic that is even half this good?

Professional Left Podcast #109

“Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."

-- Homer J. Simpson

Da' money goes here:

Good to see Alan Grayson

Join the Driftglass Book Club.


From one of the fundraising emails Representative Grayson sends me five times a week:

... 

I looked at those Iowa polling numbers again and again, and I asked myself what possible rational explanation there could be for them. And then I realized that there is no possible rational explanation. Only an irrational one.

And it’s not the candidates. It’s their voters.

Let’s see. Severe highs and lows. Violent mood swings. One day, a person thinks that someone is the messiah, and a week later, the devil. And did you see the audience during the Iowa Republican debates? Violent temper tantrums. Inexplicable angry outbursts.

Hmmmmm. What does that sound like?

It sounds like manic depression to me.

All of those manic depressives, about a third of the vote, were forced to choose among Romney, Santorum, Paul, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Cain and Huntsman.
...
So now I understand it. Romney won the paranoid vote, everyone who thinks that the brown people are trying to steal all their stuff. Why? Because no one is more white than Mitt Romney. As I said earlier today, it’s as though Romney is on a strict diet of sour cream and cottage cheese, small curds only.

Perry and Bachmann split the schizophrenic vote, all the people who hear a voice in their head, and think that it’s God. Because Perry and Bachmann can listen to the radio whenever they want to, even when it’s turned off.

Ron Paul got the obsessive-compulsive vote, the folks who think that America is like some kind of mechanical wind-up toy, and the Articles of the Constitution are the gears.

And Santorum ended up with the manic-depressive vote. Maybe because they like the way that Santorum cries in public. Boehner was their second choice.

By the way, I’m not the first person to notice this about the other side. Noted Nixon-hater Philip K. Dick actually wrote a novel about this in 1964, called “Clans of the Alphane Moon.” Except that Dick placed that story in outer space, not Iowa. Minor difference.

Nicely done,  Representative  Grayson.

Next week: "The Day the Icicle Works Closed" versus the "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" -- when is a dystopia not a dystopia?

And I'll drop you some lagniappe as soon the uptick in the American employment statistics upticks to include me :-)

Guys Like Us, We Had It Made

Those were the days.

As any Monty Python fan can tell you, nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

And as every professional pundit knew before Iowa, not even a grange-hall full of ethanol-lobotomized cow tippers could ever get themselves sufficiently shellacked to vote for the America's roving ambassador from the Vatican Office of Special Inquiry in an meaningful numbers.

And yet Iowa Republican caucus-goers did exactly that, and having been blindsided by Rick Fucking Santorum's rounding-error-tie for first place with the Romney Simulacra in Iowa, suddenly cobbling together a column's-worth of Yodi-like pronouncements on what the candidacy of Rick Fucking Santorum's means for the future of Western Civilization has suddenly become the new, must-have accessory for the top-tier pundit on-the-go.

One time-tested method of formulating an assessment favored by honest journalists is known as "journalism", which in this case would it the tedious, time-consuming task of "researching" Candidate Santorum's wholly awful, medieval opinions and then holding them up to the light in a way that is both informative and entertaining.

Rachel Maddow shows how that is done here:

At the absolute opposite end of that continuum is a lazy, sloppy and fundamentally dishonest method known as "Being David Brooks".

Being David Brooks means barely glancing at the actual, carcinomic horror show that your crazy-as-a-Betsy-bug Party long ago devolved into before deciding to fuck all that unhappiness.

Being David Brooks means your work week consists of sticking a period at the end of the first 800 words of vapid homilies, Hippie punching and assorted claptrap about American Moral Decay you pull out of your ass.

Being David Brooks means dutifully sucking the dick of whoever you perceive as being "in" at the moment, daintily dabbing the corners of you mouth after you are done, and humbly thanking whatever God you worship that Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. still believes in Wingnut Welfare.

Being David Brooks means that after your brief, ritual disclaimer that the nude, full-contact political lap dance you are about to witness is not nearly as much fun for the dancer as you might think --

A New Social Agenda

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: January 5, 2012

I’m to Rick Santorum’s left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion. I’m also put off by his Manichaean political rhetoric. ...

you then get your fanny right in there and go to town like an industrial stump grinder set to puree:

But having said all that, I’m delighted that Santorum is making a splash in this presidential campaign. He is far closer to developing a new 21st-century philosophy of government than most leaders out there.

One of Santorum’s strengths is that he understands that a nation isn’t just an agglomeration of individuals; it’s a fabric of social relationships. ...

Communities breed character. Santorum argues that government cannot be agnostic about the character of its citizens...

His political philosophy is built around the Catholic concept of subsidiarity — that everything should be done at the lowest possible level. That produces a limited role for Washington, but still an important one.

Over the years, Santorum has sought to use the federal government to nurture healthy communities....

..teach manners to children.

...he seems to understand that simply cutting is not enough to build a healthy society. To avert decline, America has to restore its values.

Santorum understands that we have to fuse economics talk and values talk. ...

If you believe in the dignity of labor...

If you believe in personal responsibility...

If you believe in the centrality of family...

If you believe social trust is the precondition for a healthy society...

And so forth.

Mr. Brooks has made a very good living championing economic, political and ideological causes which have all pretty much fallen apart right before his eyes -- and right in front of the rest of the world.

In almost any other profession, shitting oneself as badly, repeatedly and publicly as Mr. Brooks has done would be permanently disqualifying.  No tenure at barber college for you, Sweeney Todd!  But in Mr. Brooks' profession it only means that he has to change his product line around slightly; shifting slowly away from economics, foreign policy, history and all of those other irritatingly quantifiable subjects and onto much safer hobby horses like morality, values and nostalgia.

And thus does the real, despicable Rick Santorum disappear completely from Our Mr. Brooks' column and becomes just another empty vehicle for Our Mr. Brooks' to trick out with maudlin drivel; just another Christmas tree to decorate with his lazy, mendacious prose.

And why not? As patriotism has always been the last refuge of scoundrels, so has saccharine bathos always been the the last refuge of the failed Conservative pundit and politician.  I mean, why go through all the trouble of dusting the American crime scene for the fingerprints of 40 years of Conservative avarice and bigotry when you can just prop your feet up on top of the body you yourself helped to decapitate and whine about the good old days before America's moral compass was stolen by Dirty Hippies and made into a bong.

There will never be an end to the lying because there will never be any accountability for it: like Ricky Perry's Spandex jogging suit, the "America-hating Liberals ruined America" lie is so pliable that it can stretched to cover every imaginable calamity, tragedy or misshapen freak of Conservative nature.

A lie so pliable that every other line in every Republican stump speech can assert unchallenged that America wouldn't be in the mess we are in if only Liberals hadn't messed everything up.

A lie so pliable that Newt Gingrich can blame Liberals for things like Susan Smith drowning her children and Columbine and not be run out of town on a fucking rail.

A lie so pliable that David Brooks can state as fact that that there never would have been a child rape cult at the top of the Penn State football program if it hadn't been for those damn Liberals and not be fired instantly.

And slowly, by such constant, ritual repetition, the lie takes on a life and a momentum of its own, becoming a kind of cultural irredentism which asserts that all of the loss of our Former Glory was caused by degenerates who annexed and debased our Noble Values, and that to restore our Former Glory all we have to do is take our Noble Values back from the bastards and traitors who stole them.

Didn't need no welfare state. 

Everybody pulled his weight. 

 Gee, our old LaSalle ran great. 

 Those were the days.

Mussolini came to power in Italy on less.

As We Say in Chicago

"Privilege has its memberships"


From Andrew Sullivan:

Frum Joins The Beast!

An awesome addition to the masthead.

From David Frum:

FrumForum launched itself almost exactly three years ago, on Inauguration Day 2009. Over the subsequent interval, our hundreds of contributors have reached more than 5 million individual readers. I like to think that together we have helped to move the national debate. When we launched, Sarah Palin was a leading candidate for president and Glenn Beck was broadcasting conspiracy theories on cable TV. Three years later–not so much. OK, maybe we can’t claim all the credit. But we won’t refuse some fair share.

Now like all good things, this adventure is coming to an end. I’ve been invited to move my blog and print journalism to the Daily Beast/Newsweek, a larger and more technologically advanced platform. Tina Brown is one of the great media visionaries of our time. The opportunity to work with her–and learn from her–is deeply exciting.

Starting Monday, my work will shift to the Daily Beast/Newsweek site. The FrumForum URL will forward readers to the David Frum page at Daily Beast/Newsweek. FrumForum itself will continue to exist as an archive site, preserving three years of debate–the brilliant insights of our writers–and the passionate comments of our readers. Noah Kristula-Green will join me on the Daily Beast/Newsweek team.

...

For a minute there I was worried that an entire day might pass without having my worst opinions about American media underscored a dozen times with a red Sharpie pen and nailed to my forehead with a railroad spike.

But come what may, this circle really does remain unbroken.

Today in False Equivalence

Somewhere in American media, people with high profiles push the False Equivalence lie every day.

Every. Single. Day.

Which is kind of amazing, when you think about it.  Impressive, in its own, Soviet kind of way.

Today I guess it was David Frum's turn to pull the plow:

President Obama has engaged in a dubious maneuver to force a recess appointment through a Senate that denies it has recessed. 

... 

The president’s action has ignited a fireworks show of Republican outrage. And yes, Obama has here pushed presidential power beyond past limits. But it’s not only presidents who can bend the rules. The Senate has also pushed its powers here beyond the usual limits... 

...

Over the past three decades, we have lived through a prolonged cycle of partisan revenge. Each party pushes the law to score partisan points in ways that would have been deemed unacceptable only just a little while ago. Then at the next turn of the cycle, the other party pushes the law further and wider and even more destructively.

Of course this is not true.

 Not true at all, and everyone knows it.

There are any number of graphs and charts which I could insert here comparing Republican on the subjects of filibusters, recess appointments and general assholery (some of which, such as a link to this perennial favorite:

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult 

Saturday 3 September 2011 

...
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.


To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.


It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.

are to be found right in Mr. Frum's comment section) but why bother?

From professional fabulists like Frum and Brooks on the discredited Right, to lavishly remunerated clowns like Gregory and Halperin in the Fake Center, to the priests of the Church of Our Lady of Professional Indignation on the Left, there is far too much cash flow tied up in pretending that there is not a dime's worth of difference between the Left and the Right to let a little thing like objective reality get in the way.

And no amount of howling into that fiscal headwind is going to change this dynamic any time soon.

Still...

Still, try imagining you have a job.

Lucky you! :-)

Now imagine you have to share a cubicle with a lunatic.

The lunatic has a hammer, and every time you try to do anything -- anything at all, no matter how innocuous -- answer the phone, use your computer, mail a letter -- the lunatic smashes it with his hammer.

Every time you try to bypass or roll over the lunatic, your boss orders you to leave him alone. Informs you that you are required to work together as a team.

After all, who doesn't love teamwork!

Your boss then pats the lunatic on the head, and docks your pay.

Every time you try to work with the lunatic, he cracks your skull with his hammer, sets fire to your desk and scampers away, giggling.

After which your boss stops by to pat the lunatic on the head again, and cut your pay again.

When asked, the lunatic proudly justifies his behavior be explaining that you are really an arachnid from Tau Ceti masquerading as a human and sent here to murder us all in our sleep in advance of a mass invasion by your fellow arachnids from Tau Ceti. Therefor any hostile action on his part -- no matter how bugfuck or destructive -- is justified.

This country is not broken because you and the lunatic you share your cubicle with are both equally crazy and wrong.

It is broken because too many people have a huge professional, political and financial stake in pretending that you and the lunatic you share your cubicle with are both equally crazy and wrong.