Today's Driftglass

Another good essay on why a David Brooks column isn't worth the boogers in your nose.

For you budding Brooksologists out there, one thing that's very helpful to understand when parsing David Brooks' terrible writing is that virtually every David Brooks column is about David Brooks.

These columns are usually occasioned by one of Mr. Brooks' many, barely-contained insecurities or loathings being dislodged by events in the world, which then comes pouring out refracted and sublimated under the cover of an op-ed on ... whatever.

So for example, when you read this by Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times --

Harvard’s False Path to Wisdom
Sometimes sin is an opportunity for redemption.

-- you can be damn sure that something has happened which feels like it threatens the equilibrium of ecosystem in which Mr. Brooks operates.

Today's inciting incident was Harvard's revocation of Kyle Kashuv's admission to their university based on some incredibly racist and antisemitic (h/t Yastreblyansky) things he wrote when he was in high school and which have only recently come to light.

For Kyle Kashuv, this means he has once again joined the billions of human beings on Earth who won't being going to Harvard. Sad!  After all, Harvard is a Privilege Factory with more money than God and Mark Cuban (it is frequently referred to as a "hedge fund with a university attached") and when it comes to admissions it can do pretty much whatever it wants to do.

But for David Brooks, this is his nightmare scenario.

The nightmare of a Conservative who had made his way into one of America's most elite Privilege Factories --

Most of the famous Parkland students lean progressive and support gun control laws. Kashuv leans conservative. He’s appeared on conservative media, got to meet Donald Trump and lobbied for the STOP School Violence Act, which would create an annual $50 million grant to schools for training programs and reporting systems. He became a student face for the gun rights crowd.

 -- only to find himself suddenly kicked out because of things he had written in the past.  

The nightmare that someone other than a few nobody Liberal bloggers might actually take a look at the shit David Brooks has actually written over the decades -- the saccharine schlock, the incompetently researched/cherry-picked propaganda, the hypocrisy, the venomous hippie-punching and the interminable Both Siderism.  

The nightmare that someone with actual, decision-making authority within the privileged Beltway media ecosystem might open the books on Mr. David Brooks and discover that he is almost always horribly wrong about everything and then decides that the time has come for Mr. Brooks to seek employment elsewhere.

Today's Tweet

Read your Driftglass

You'll never go broke betting on the depravity, pig-ignorance and cowardice of Republicans.

Of course, on the one hand it will render you too strident for anyone anywhere to touch you with a barge pole...

— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) October 7, 2018

- and -

"When a donkey flies, you don't blame him for not staying up that long."

Quick Lesson

We stay because we believe
We leave because we're disillusioned
We come back because we're lost
We die because we're committed

Why I prefer my Revolution without the "R".

hat tip = driftglass

That Wrinkle Is Not New

When we're talking about the all-time list of Top 10 Oxymorons, "Russian Gun Rights" has to be in the conversation.

Yahoo News:

A Russian gun-rights activist who developed close relations with leaders of the National Rifle Association as well as conservative activists working with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was arraigned Monday on charges she conspired to influence American politics on behalf of the Russian government.

Maria Butina, 29, who founded the Russian gun group “The Right to Bear Arms” and worked as the executive assistant to a top official of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, was arrested Sunday by the FBI in Washington, D.C., where she had been living. The charges allege that she visited the United States in 2015 and 2016 for the purposes of acting “as an agent” of the Russia, according to a criminal complaint released by the U.S. Justice Department on Monday afternoon, a few hours after President Trump and Russian President Putin met in Helsinki. Butina conspired to “exploit personal connections” with U.S. political figures and to “infiltrate organizations active in U.S. politics” and establish “back channel lines of communication” in an effort to advance Russian government interests, the complaint charges.

And just like "the good Germans", and "the ordinary Soviet citizens", and "the plain folk of Cambodia", and and and - the main question (as it always is) will be:

How did so many of us get so fucking stoopid?

It's not simple, but this classic from Driftglass gives a pretty good look at how this shit happens:

One day we will have to explain to the children what happened when Thurston Howell III lost his right mind and decided that for the sake of some tax cuts to make him incrementally more comfortable, his very bestest buddies in the whole, wide world were the Ultra Right Wing Gorgons down in Jesusland.

May I suggest the following?

The Story of Little Red State Fundy

Little Red State Fundy found a grain of hate.

"Who will help me plant the hate?" she asked.

"Not I," said the Moderate Republicans.

"Not I," said the Undecideds.

"Not I," said the Libertarians.

"Then I will," said Little Red State Fundy.

So she buried the hate in the bloody ground of the Old Confederacy. After a while it grew up paranoid and ignorant and violent.

This joint didn't get all fucked up yesterday, and we're not going to unfuck it by tomorrow.

Chop the wood. Carry the water.

ProLeft Podcast

The Professional Left

Buy some ProLeft swag

Episode 441:

Guess which party's been wrong about practically everything.

We talk about Rudy Guiliani, at least one person who is "tired of winning," and a number of people who've discovered all of a sudden that Truth is important, like Rex Tillerson and Matthew Dowd. A surprising sincere apology in the wrong place, the "Democrats in Disarray" lie never dies, and a wake up call for conservatives on Medicaid and nursing homes.

At this point, where 30-35% of Americans are all set to riot - set to pull a Charlottesville on the streets of dozens of cities - the latest version (GOP 5.0) of New Conservative Republicans are wondering, "How do you sell truth to rubes who refuse to hear anything but Benghazi or Emails or Vince Foster or Troopergate or Pizzagate or Kenyan Usurper or or or?

But the real question - the one that driftglass and Blue Gal are spectacularly good at rooting out: "How did those gullible rubes get to be so fucking Gullibly Rube-ish?"

A Short Reminder

From October 2015 - it's not like people weren't trying to warn us about what was coming.

When Even George Will...

George Will is years past his freshness date, but just as a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while, so Mr Will can still bring it on rare occasions.

On Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night:

Money quote: "... Mr Pence is surface all the way through."

Be mindful that Mr Will can trash 45* and his trained monkeys, but still miss the broader point that it's the GOP that's been putting these assholes up front for a solid 30 years.

The party built these monsters. The party owns that responsibility, and a guy like George Will bought 3 or 4 houses and took nice long vacations in Europe on the money he was paid to animate the monster.

So it gives us a Warm-n-Fuzzy to hear ol' George say those things about Cult45, but we've been here before. We had that same feeling when Will trashed Bush43 about 15 years ago.

He tries to make it sound like he's widening out his criticism by saying Pence has given in to  tribalism, but that word - "Tribal" - is great example of ducking the issue by using vague terms to invite the inference that it's a Both Sides problem, and therefor everything is equal and therefor we can go on pretending that it's not the GOP that's the fucking problem.

Read your driftglass

Coffee Cast

A new one for me.  Pretty "hard left" (not that there's anything wrong with it).

This episode features Blue Gal and driftglass. Mighty fine.

A Glimmer

A glimmer of what, I don't really know. Not yet anyway, but WaPo ran an OpEd piece today that tells us the truth about our "Hyper-Partisanship Problem".

Catherine Rampell:

Dysfunctional Washington refuses to work out its differences to solve problems that matter to Americans.

So say pundits and policy activists, perhaps hoping that diffuse criticism, rather than finger-pointing, will yield a government willing to govern.

But the problem isn’t “Washington.” It isn’t “Congress,” either. The problem is elected officials from a single political party: the GOP.
- and -

...Even the awe-inspiring Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student survivors, while calling for stronger gun-control measures, have appeared cautious about disproportionately picking on Republicans.

“I was very partisan in the beginning and violently attacking the GOP. I was angry and scared. Now I know that people from every party are supporting us. Everybody is demanding change,” junior Cameron Kasky tweeted when a critic accused him of spouting “Democrat talking points.”

Kasky is, of course, correct that Americans of all parties demand change. But politicians of all parties do not.

And, as always - driftglass

I used to devote more time and viscera deconstructing the Weekend Gasbag Cavalcade back when there was a glimmer of hope that if enough of us documented and published the catastrophic failures of our political media over and over and over again, it might change their collective behavior.

I no longer believe that.

Clearly, their contemptable collective behavior is an organizational feature and not a bug, and therefore unfixable until it becomes unbearably more painful for the men and women who control our corporate media to change their ways than to maintain the status quo. I still take note of the weekly crimes against journalism and the vipers and pettyfoggers who commit them, but now it is more with an eye towards the future. Just a dime-store Josephus documenting who we are and why this is happening to us as our country is systematically gutted by forces beyond my control. And I think I write a pretty honest stick, but this Sunday I can't sum things up any better than @51Renee on the Twitter machine:
Trump having a meltdown today.

Jill Stein having a meltdown today.
Bernie snapping at Chuck Todd today.
Hillary Clinton is laughing her ass off.
She tried to tell you.
#StillWithHer

Yeah, that's about where we're at.
I don't expect driftglass to stop doing what he does, but the guy's been at it for 10 years, thinking only a few of us are hearing it. And he needs a break - everybody does once in a while. You can only slam your face into that wall so many times before you have to walk away, find a good place to sit, and just think about nothing for a while.

So Ms Rampell comes through for us with a good assessment, and hope lives in expecting more of that.

Hang in there, driftglass - and everybody else too.

Today's driftglass

Blog post from driftglass:

As I have might have mentioned in a long-ago post, I became a pariah on many a liberal blog where I was once welcome when I took it into my head to start writing that it was possible that one could simultaneously hold these two ideas:

1 - Mr. Greenwald was the source of many important and consequential stories which he developed thanks to being given Edward Snowden's huge cache of stolen documents.

2 - Mr. Greenwald was also a thin-skinned asshole who routinely derailed his own story by injecting his own brand of radical Both Siderism into them. That he spent an entire year hopping from one teevee network to the next pleading his case, all while complaining bitterly that no one would give him a media platform from which to plead his case. That he would routinely lie to make a point or smash an opponent, automatically dismissed anyone who disagreed with him to any degree as a drooling jackbooted Obot who was obviously arguing in bad-faith, and consistently hijacked every terrorist incident anywhere on Earth as proof that Obama Was Worse Than Boosh.
Toxic Radical Both-Siderism - the politics of purity.

Fake lord save us from those who would punish us in the name of mercy and their own twisted version of forgiveness. Fuck 'em.

driftglass Explains

Our Lonely War On Pronouns Has A New General

As you probably know, we here at the DGBG Productions (driftglass blog, The Professional Left Podcast, etc.) have been waging a long, lonely war against the promiscuous use "we", "us", "The American people", "The Congress", "Washington D.C." and any other language deployed by the media and by Republican politicians in the service of pretending that somehow everyone and all institutions are collectively and equally culpable for explicitly Republican cowardice, Republican barbarity, Republican racism and Republican sedition.

Or that, conversely, the energetic and resolution opposition to explicitly Republican cowardice, Republican barbarity, Republican racism and Republican sedition is something that "we" are all in together. That, for example. stripping tens of millions of Americans of their health care in order to pay for tax cuts for plutocrats with something up with which "the American people" would not put.

No, no and no.

Because other than geographically, there is no such critter as "the American people".

And also too, "...but the Democrats didn't stop 'em..." is a close relative of Both-Siderism.

The sheriff who gets killed by the mob when he tries to defend his prisoner is not to blame for the lynching that follows.

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.

driftglass

...reminding us (just in case you're still a little unclear on the concept) that if we don't learn our History, then we don't learn from our History.  Particularly, how to keep from making the same fucking mistakes over and over and over again.

Take it away driftglass (@Mr_Electrico)

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan killed something called The Fairness Doctrine:

The Fairness Doctrine was a policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was — in the Commission's view — honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC, which was believed to have been under pressure from then President Ronald Reagan, eliminated the Doctrine in 1987.

For the record, the two federal judges who helped Reagan kill the Fairness Doctrine were future-Supreme Court incubus Antonin Scalia, and disgraced Nixon henchman Robert Bork.  After helping to hold down the Fairness Doctrine while Reagan smothered it, both men went on to enjoy long and fruitful careers as wingnut icons and ruiners of American democracy.

driftglass almost always runs a little long, but that's cuz he drinks good Scotch and he knows things. And there's a shitload to know, so it can take a while for him to recount it all for us.

Learn a little sumpthin'.

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.