How Great I Art

Many thanks to tengrain at MockPaperScissors for putting eVilleTimes in the mentions at Crooks & Liars 

That spun me up to several times what my usual traffic is for 3 days runnin'.

Now, if I could just get those pesky Russians to lay off - makes me a little nervous to think I'm attracting the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people.

Today's Quote

A blast from the past - Driftglass ages well.

Most newly minted "Independents" seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want to believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead, they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they've stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

-- Driftglass

Today's Tweet

The Rude Pundit

Remind me of the crimes Democrats accused Gorsuch of, you lummox. Or Roberts. Or Alito. Go away, you fucking child. https://t.co/JGXOO1xA0g

— The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit) September 23, 2018

Driftglass Reminds

"Everybody in the whole world is fucked up except you and me - and I'm beginning to wonder about you."

Referencing The Power Of Nightmares is always a treat.

Driftglass:

Or, as one low-born, bootless blabbermouth once said about Mr. Greenwald's Purity Cult back when daring to say such things in public would get your Liberal card revoked and your readership cut by 1/3...

...once purity itself becomes all you care about -- once  it becomes a distillery race to see who can get to 100% -- the chicken farmers are never far behind:

The main Islamist group in Algeria, the GIA, ended up being led by a Mr. Zouabri, a chicken farmer, who killed everyone who disagreed with him. He issued a final communiqué, declaring that the whole of Algerian society should be killed, with the exception of his tiny remaining band of Islamists. They were the only ones who understood the truth.

And from my perspective, do you know what the saddest sentence in the entire New Yorker article is?

It's this:

 Leading American progressives -- speaking off the record, and apologizing for what they describe as cowardice -- call Greenwald a bully and a troll.

So everybody knew, but nobody said anything, because all the clever dogs on the inside decided to play it safe and lay back in the cut rather than risk the wrath of Spleenwald Horde.

Welly, well, well, well.

Sure doesn't sound much like "leading", especially to someone like me who was out there taking it in the teeth every day for saying true, important and unpopular things about Mr. Greenwald while my so-called allies chose to hide in the hedges and haystacks.

Here's the rest of the paragraph:

One told me that “he makes everything war.” The spouse of one of Greenwald’s friends visualizes him as the angry emoji. On Twitter, he has little use for agree-to-disagree courtesies, or humor: he presses on. More than one tweet has started with “No, you idiot.” He’ll tweet “Go fuck yourself” to a user with twenty or so followers. A few years ago, Greenwald had a Twitter disagreement with Imani Gandy, a legal journalist, who tweets as @AngryBlackLady; another Twitter user, in support of Greenwald, proposed to Gandy that “Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you’d say we weren’t seeing what we were seeing.” Greenwald replied, “No -- she’d say it was justified & noble -- that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape.”

A Critique

It's about Thomas Friedman, but really it's about Thomas Friedman and David Brooks and Maggie Ball and Jennifer Rubin and Peggy Noonan and Mark Shields - all the "heavy hitters" who work very hard to avoid having to acknowledge they've been wrong about most things in the last 30 years...

... and the fairly simple fact they continue to put out a counterfeit product - while raking in large piles of cash - must give us pause, cuz holy fuck, it looks a whole lot like their real job is to keep us stuck in the middle by constantly pimping the Both Sides crapola. ie: if we can't identify the problem, we can't formulate a solution.

...and Michael Gerson (see: driftglass)

Today in Republican Detachment Disorder, the Washington Post has once again paid former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Michael Gerson, to take up his quill and proclaim that his Republican Party just all of the sudden became a racist shitpile a couple of years ago.

It today's exciting episode, Mr. Gerson -- whose business is words -- pretends that he does not understand what the word "exposes" means:

Trump exposes the hypocrisy of Christian Republicans

 From the dictionary:

ex·pose

verb, 3rd person present: exposes

make (something) visible, typically by uncovering it.

Mr. Gerson -- who has worn his Conservative evangelical Christian bona fides on his sleeve right next to his "Ride or Die Republican" credentials for his entire adult life -- really wants you to believe that Good Republicans like Michael Gerson had no fucking idea that Christian Republicans are, in fact, Christopath Republicans; a word I coined 13 years ago, back when Mr. Michael Gerson was being paid to put words in George W. Bush's mouth and thoughts into George W. Bush's head.

The point is - the point driftglass (et al) have been trying to get thru to us forever - these guys are wrong all the fucking time and our "liberal" media conglomerates keep them around anyway.

Today's Tweet

Nobody's better at this than driftglass.

#MorningJoe

Watch the puppets dance@realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/HpSOrK8h1n

— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) October 30, 2017

 

@Mr_Electrico

driftglass.blogspot.com

Today's driftglass

Asking for several gazillion friends - whatever happened to that Greenwald guy?

You know, that guy who I used to write about from time to time and point out that he lied kind of a lot about really big, important issues? Bit of a thin-skinned asshole and monumental hypocrite whose automatic response to any criticism from anyone was all-out, knives-out attack? Who divided the world neatly into "People who agree completely with Glenn Greenwald" and "Drooling, jackbooted Obot servants of tyranny?"

Yeah, last I saw him he was stooging over on Fox News with his BFF, Tucker Carlson:

.@ggreenwald on media: I think what it is, more than dishonesty, is really warped incentive scheme bolstered by this very severe groupthink pic.twitter.com/CXIl2On7CY

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 18, 2017

20/20 Retrospective

The New Yorker, David Remnick

Donald Trump’s ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama’s election as an inspiring chapter in the country’s fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the “food-stamp President.” In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a “liberal fascist,” who was assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim that was part of the economic-stimulus package was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect. “You just look at the body language, and there’s something going on,” Trump said, last summer. In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President’s person.

And so, speeding toward yet another airport last November, Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. “We’ve seen this coming,” he said. “Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails.”

For half a century, in fact, the leaders of the G.O.P. have fanned the lingering embers of racial resentment in the United States. Through shrewd political calculation and rhetoric, from Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the latest charges of voter fraud in majority-African-American districts, doing so has paid off at the ballot box. “There were no governing principles,” Obama said. “There was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’ ”

Woulda been nice if the Press Poodles had made slightly more of a point about how Repubs had "fanned the lingering embers" over the last 50 fucking years. 

It almost amazes me that everybody suddenly sees what's been going on. 

As always, driftglass finds a good example of how Poodles do their little poodling thing:

A Closer Look

tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Pundits have told us since that fateful day when Comrade Preznint Stupid won the election, a large number of white, working class Dims had changed lanes. The Villagers told us that these voters so hated Crooked Killery (“but her E-MAIL!!1!) that they voted for Hair Führer. The very serious media people told us that these voters were deserters and that they must be appeased for the Dims to ever win anything again.

Looks like that might be BS.

Shocking, I know.

BTW - tengrain is so good, he inspires his blog followers to come up with the bestly brilliantest nicknames.

Everybody - say hello to Pee Wee Goebbels:

Nailed it

driftglass lands a big one on Matthew Dowd.

I just want to really know from Trump apologists, what could the President or WH do that would cause you to no longer support them?

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) July 12, 2017

Says a man who proudly pissed his vote away on a vanity candidate because he was just too fucking pure to sully himself by voting for the only candidate who could have actually stopped Trump.

So I just want to really know from all the Purity Angels including Mr. Dowd what could President Stupid or the White House do that would cause you to admit that you fucked up. Bigly.

Today's driftglass

driftglass:

Hey, Matt. I have an idea!

You're from Texas. And the Dixie Chicks are from Texas. So why don't you hop in your spiffy "Country Over Party" pickup truck, hie your tender sensibilities over to their place and have them share with you what life was like for them -- and for Liberals generally -- during the glorious reign of your former boss.

driftglass

From driftglass today:

On the special election in GA-06:

On the one hand, as I said after the 2016 election, I have never gone wrong betting on the racism and arrogant ignorance of the Right: I've only erred occasionally on the point spread. And six months later my faith in the suicidal stupidity of the average Republican voter remains deep and abiding.

On the other hand, every election between now and 2020 is a referendum on President Stupid and his just-fucking-sack-the-place agenda.

Countervailing

From Mock Paper Scissors, a list of people banding together on Twitter to form a Shadow Cabinet in order to fact-check and countervail 45*'s bullshit:

• LAURENCE TRIBE, “Attorney General” — Constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School.
• MARIELENA HINCAPIE, “INS/ICE/Immigration” — executive director, National Immigration Law Center
• DERAY MCKESSON, “Justice Issues” – Co-founder, Black Lives Matter, civil rights activist.
• ROBERT REICH, “Labor/Commerce” — Ex-Labor Secretary, best-selling author.
• LAURA TYSON, “Treasury/Trade” — Ex-chair CEA, professor at BerkeleyHass Business School
• DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, “IRS” — Pulitzer prize-winning journo/author. Founder of new DCReport.
• DIANE RAVITCH, “Education” — Professor at NYU, author/editor of 24 books on education.
• JOAN CLAYBROOK, “Transportation” — Ex-head of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
• ROB WEISSMAN, “Consumer Agencies” — President, Public Citizen.
• DAVID FREEMAN, “Energy & EPA” — Ex-head of TVA & NYS Power Authority.
• DAVID HIMMELSTEIN, STEFFIE WOOLFINDLER, “HHS/Health” — Distinguished Professors at Pub. Health School, CUNY/Hunter; co-founders Physicians for National Health.
• COLIN KAHL, “NSA/Terrorism” – V.P. Biden’s National Security Adviser.
• ROSA BROOKS, “State Department” — Ex–DoD counselor, author, columnist Foreign Policy.
• ANDREW BACEVICH, “Defense Department” — Author/historian, BU.Pardee School Global Affairs.

@ShadowingTrump

driftglass

Nobody deconstructs David Brooks better than driftglass:

In case you hadn't caught on by now, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times is not really a person.

Mr. David Brooks is a brand. Mr. David Brooks is a profitable multimedia Conservative corporation that specializes in one and only one service. Like a bank or insurance company or funeral home, Mr. David Brooks sells reassurance. He specializes in very high-dollar, high-influence clients. Addlepated university presidents, for example. CEOs. Political professionals. Beltway media assholes. Sclerotic, plutocrat shut-ins. And so on.

His job for the last 20 years has been to reassure his clients that no matter how fucking insane, obstructionist, incompetent, vicious, dishonest, seditious and pig-ignorant the Republican Party may appear to be on any given day, it's not really as bad as you think. In fact, the real Republican Party -- the secret Republican Party which operates behind a curtain that only Mr. David Brooks can peek and sets policy using a code only Mr. David Brooks can decipher -- is doing just fine.

Everything is under control.

And if there are evident cracks below the water-line? Well you can trust Me. David Brooks when he tells you that they're very tiny cracks -- inconsequential really -- and certainly weren't caused by the captain and crew of the USS Saint Ronald Reagan rammed the ship repeatedly into every fucking iceberg in the North Atlantic.

 

One For The Books

From Benjamin Wittes at LAWFARE:

The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly—and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.

NBC is reporting that the document was not reviewed by DHS, the Justice Department, the State Department, or the Department of Defense, and that National Security Council lawyers were prevented from evaluating it. Moreover, the New York Times writes that Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the agencies tasked with carrying out the policy, were only given a briefing call while Trump was actually signing the order itself. Yesterday, the Department of Justice gave a “no comment” when asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed Trump’s executive orders—including the order at hand. (OLC normally reviews every executive order.)

This order reads to me, frankly, as though it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all.

Mr Wittes is a Senior Fellow at Brookings, and so he's not exactly Mr Conservative, but he's also not a Leftie Looney and while this is from the guy's blog, I was linked to it from The Brookings Institution's website, where it seems like the use of terms like "malevolence" and "horrific" in reference to a POTUS is a bit unusual.

Something could be up. There's an awful lotta smoke for no fire.

With Apologies To Mr Truman

Sarah Cooper - on psychological warfare:

“But reporters were clapping and laughing, they loved it.”  — a commenter defending Trump’s first press conference.

“But members of the CIA were clearly laughing at his jokes and clapping, so what he was saying couldn’t have been inappropriate.”  — CNN pundit defending Trump’s CIA speech where he talked about his war with the media, in front of a memorial to men and women who lost their lives in actual wars.

The clapping and laughing you hear in both instances are Trump’s own people. They are sycophants who he brings to cheer him on and make it seem like what he’s saying is being well-received. And it’s working.

The laugh track was invented to cue the audience to the jokes and encourage laughter in response. But it has another effect: if you hear people laughing and you’re not, you start to question if maybe there’s something wrong with you for not getting it. You might even impulsively start laughing just to fit in, not because you think anything is funny. In fact that’s how these fluffers work — one person initiates a clap and suddenly everyone thinks there’s something to clap for. And then everyone is clapping. For no reason.

It's business and it's politics. It's the business of politics, and the merging of politics with business, wrapped in the flag and blessed by the church. The result is the institutionalized hyper-corruption-on-steroids called Fascism. In that system especially, if you wanna friend, buy a dog.

I won't be forgiving of willful ignorance. I won't be tolerant of Alternative Facts. I won't be quiet about it.

And while I'll always try not to be deliberately unkind to you, understand that I'll fail in that regard on occasion, because I won't treat you like a child by tiptoeing around your delicate sensibilities.

I'm really not trying to be an asshole about it - it just seems like too many people are trying to make it impossible for me not to be.

So put all of this under "Sorry-Not-Sorry-But".

If you come in here without a helmet,

you might leave with some brain damage.

Nobody Does This Better

driftglass:

I feel compelled to point out that back when Comrade Trump was declaring that his Party would be a Worker's Party, certain internet scoundrel hobos were trying in vain to call Meathead America's attention to the fact that, according to Comrade Trump's own words...

Comrade Trump Sings Songs Of Love

Comrade Trump promises that under his regime he will...

...tell American companies what they can produce and where they can produce it.

...tell American companies who they can hire and how much they will be paid.

...use the power of government to keep American workers working in dying industries despite what the market says.

...conquer inferior countries who have stuff we want.

...weed out the undesirables whoever they may be and wherever they may hide.

...build an axis of strong alliances with other like-minded Strong Menaround the world.

...not be held hostage by the counterrevolutionary forces of bourgeoisie science.

Today's driftglass

driftglass on what to do when trying to hold Trump accountable.

In Bridge on the River Kwai, Colonel Saito never understood Colonel Nicholson...
You are stubborn,  but have no pride.
You endure, but you have no courage.
,,,but Nicholson understood Saito perfectly. 
Saito was a not-very-bright middle-manager -- a Reince Preibus -- whose only tools are the blunt instruments of the inept martinet.  And that would have been sufficient if all he had to do was keep a bunch of prisoners locked up and in line, but was also charged by his superiors with completing critical infrastructure project which neither he nor the men under his command were competent to perform. 

Saito can threaten and torture all he likes...
...but since he refuses to abide by the rule of the civilized world...
...he absolves those who are civilized of any obligation to respect his authority:

And we on the Left understand Trump and the Right just as perfectly.

You are defeated, but you have no shame.

Saito [speaking of the Geneva Convention]:  You speak to me of code?  What code?  The coward's code!  What do you know of the soldier's code, of Bushido?  Nothing!  You are unworthy of command!

Nicholson:  Since you refuse to abide by the laws of the civilized world...we must consider ourselves absolved from our duty to obey you.

 

New Age Of Fear

Be sure to get a good daily dose of driftglass 

A Short Hit Of That driftglass If You Please

In which @MillerForTexas calls @HillaryClinton the c-word. He's since deleted the tweet #txlege #Election2016 pic.twitter.com/mXnEMIMDqV

— Joshua Fechter (@JFreports) November 1, 2016

Gettin' after Sid Miller in that Eyes-Of-Texas-Are-Upon-Ya kinda way.

driftglass:

Republican Mad Cow (or, as it has been known to medical professionals since 2006, Rovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) is a tough beat.

Wait -
Trump 44
Cunt 43

What?  I didn't know Sid Miller was running against Trump - but maybe he'd be doing better if he'd take a little time and work on that self-image thing.