20 years too late.

From here:

Conservative writer and radio host D.R. Tucker is no stranger to challenging conservative orthodoxy. On FrumForum he published his Confessions of a Climate Change Convert and now he has written about why he can no longer support Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh Loses a Listener

I stood by Limbaugh, especially when the left suggested that he was bigoted because of his controversial remarks about football star Donovan McNabb and his promotion of an anti-Barack Obama parody song. Standing by Limbaugh wasn’t easy: I found his 2008 attacks on the “conservative intelligentsia” (i.e., David Frum, David Brooks, William Kristol and Ross Douthat) to be over-the-top, and his suggestion that race was the main factor behind Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama to be unsupported by facts. However, I felt compelled to defend him whenever liberals would question me about his remarks.
,..

Even after I stopped listening to Limbaugh, I still felt compelled to give him the benefit of the doubt on the question of race.

Until now.
...

Another self-loathing doormat for the New Confederacy who finally ran out of slivers of his soul to sell and stopped shucking for Boss Limbaugh long enough to notice that he was on the fucking menu.

Like the Old Confederacy

Limbaugh's New Confederacy could not function without a cadre self-loathing flunkies. Self-loathing women, minorities, gays; these have traditionally formed the the crispy, golden deep-fried Monte Cristo crust of camera-friendly respectability on the GIANT shit sandwich of hatred, bigotry and invincible ignorance that is the Modern Conservative Movement.

No word as to whether Uncle Ruckus

Mr. Tucker -- quite possibly the stupidest man in America -- will be hanging onto whatever perks and goodies that a lifetime of ranting about Evil Libruls and generally stooging for transparently evil men has given him.

I would assume not.

In fact, if the past "Confederacy of Dunces" behavior of Conservative Expats is any measure, I assume Mr. Tucker's pals will help him snag a sweet ride on the next media gravy train leaving the station without missing a beat.

So what does the three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at da Jewel have to do with the slow death of Wikipedia?

Funny you should ask.

From Gawker:

Wikipedia Is Slowly Dying

Jimmy Wales, the iconoclastic founder of Wikipedia, made a troubling announcement at the seventh annual Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore. Is Wikipedia going to shrivel up and fade away?

Wales told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. "We are not replenishing our ranks," he said, "it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important." According to Wales a lot of the core Wikipedians have simply aged out, got married and found that they have better things to do with their time. Previous rumors of Wikipedias demise have focused on a lack of any new stuff to add; but this seems like a real existential threat.
...

And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags.
...

We have a cherished saying in my family: "Let's you and him fight."

Which, translated, is our way of recognizing-with-an-Ozark-laugh that the world is full of people who have lots of good ideas about how other people should spend their abundant "spare time".

What's happening with Wikipedia is not a web phenomenon: it's just the latest manifestation of same something-for-nothing shell game played by every two-bit Alexander the Great I (and probably you) have ever worked for.

It is the fantasy on which turned just about every executive staff session I was ever dragooned into attending into a meeting of all-quarterbacks and no wide-receivers where every wild, dumb idea was flung blindly down-field to no one at all -- in the passive "someone really should move the building two feet to the left!" voice -- by organizational deadwood who later tell their loved ones what heroes they had been that day.

It is the fantasy that allows elected goofs get away with promising that if gummint were just "run like a business" everything would be fine. (Which is bullshit. Most gummint -- most lousy gummint -- is run exactly like a lousy business: idiots on top who got there because or their last names or their college roommates, making far too much money than they are worth by loading up the men and women who actually till the soil and tread the grain [so to speak] with more work than they can possible accomplish [the goof on top didn't get there by telling the public "No"]...and then bitching about their general laziness and clockwatchery, or outsourcing the whole deal to some third party for a quick buck.)

It is the fantasy that has turned unpaid interns into unwitting scabs, and WalMart into an American success story instead of something foul and feudal about which we should be heartily ashamed.

It is the ancient Faustian bargain of the slaveholder – an army of uncomplaining servants created by, oh, let’s say “Providence” to provide the privileged with an endless stream of luxuries at bargain basement prices, and around which mankind has historically erected all manner of depraved theologies explaining why those who do the work should not enjoy the fruits of their labor, but should content themselves sitting on the porch, singin' spirituals.

As I wrote back in 2006:

Live Free or Buy

[Tom Friedman] also treads as lightly as a chubby mouse in a catnip bomber-jacket navigating the main floor of the Lion House just around sup-sup-sup-suppertime, because far too much of his personal well-being is staked to his main gig -- delivering ten-year-old platitudes about globalization to twenty-years-out-of-date, Conservative CEOs. Rich, white men with Republican rock-ribs, who adore George Bush and have voted straight GOP-ticket since they were old enough to golf in ugly pants.

Men who live in First Class – sometimes, to be clear and fair, through dint of long hours and hard work, which are traits to be admired – and have deluded themselves into believing that they can outsource the rivets and steel that hold the plane together, the engines that make it go and the flight crew that navigates it safely though the storm…and yet somehow they will be able to fly on in comfort forever, fueled by consultants and canny financial valuation trickery.

Friedman catches such men as the last of their employees plummet wholesale Earthward, as they sit in the skeletal airframe of their once-proud ships and the deathly cold wind of 30,000 feet is whistling though their ass-cracks and he advises that, perhaps, Steps Of Some Kind Should Be Taken.
...

We may or may not be able to educate our way out of the corner we’re in, but to even attempt to do so, we first have to come squarely to terms with who we are, what we are, and how we really got here.

To do that, consider this, which is one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Chaplin.
“The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.”

That is the dirty truth and true root of our problem; We have become the saddest thing Charlie Chaplin could imagine.

“We have become used to luxury.”

Those $.99 chicken fingers? The $12 bumper-to-bumper, inside-and-out car-wash? The three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at the Jewel?

These are, all of them, luxury items, created not by a band of rugged Libertarians hewing agricultural and technological miracles out of the living rock, but made possible by an ocean of cheap labor, federal subsidies and a continent rich beyond the dreams of Avarice in natural resources.

What we’re all about (and always have been) is manufacturing what, for most of human history, has been luxury goods, selling them cheap and living fat off the margins. There is nothing at all wrong with making a living doing this, except that in the long run, every race will go to the cleverest, and right now our problem is that we don’t believe that.

We are drowning in our own mythos of Sunshine, Freedom and Manifest Destiny.

We have take a fatal dose of our own Exceptionalism propaganda and have internalized down to our tubby little toesies the belief that God Almighty wants us to live in opulence.

That God wants gas prices to be low.
...

In 1861 the South was prosperous specifically because of the forced labor of four million brown people who were reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

In 2006, America is prosperous specifically because of the peonage-cheap, illegal labor of twelve million brown people who are reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

We tolerate with a wink-and-a-nudge a system that simultataneously criminalizes a labor force of twelve million to keep them underground and terrified, and then carefully extracts their labor for pennies.

Any social policy which doesn’t confront immigration on those terms will fail and fail badly because, in the end, we really only have two choices: Either a renegotiation of the social contract to pay working people a living wage, or an open recognition that we will forever rely more and more on cheaper and cheaper labor to remain spoiled and Holy.

So far we have chosen neither. We have chosen to burn through our collective inheritance of wealth and prestige to make foolish choices, set foolish policies, wage foolish wars, without having to feel any pain. Like crack-heads, we have stolen from our parents and mooched from our children enough fast, high-interest cash to allow us to trundle along in a state of oblivious Eloi-ness where we don’t have to make any hard decisions and our God-Given Right to Comfort and Ease keeps us from asking too many tough questions about where all this Free Lunch is actually coming from.

But Physics and Economics are brutal loan-sharks and we can’t all live forever on borrowed money, no matter how successful certain individuals like Dubya have been at doing just that.
...

I use Wikipedia for the occasional fast quote or summary here and there. I appreciate its convenience, just as I appreciate the convenience of free-of-charge services like YouTube and Blogger and gmail.

But I do not own them, and if they went away tomorrow I would find other tools with which to do my thing.

"Crowdsourcing", "cognitive surplus" and suchlike have never been anything but webslang for Homer J. Simpson's famous campaign slogan: "Can't someone else do it?"

And if you build your business, your ideology or your nation like "a foolish man who built his house on the sand" don't come crying to me when the rain comes and washes it all away.

In case you missed it (and why wouldn't you?) the spectacularly irrelevant Moustache of Understanding has written yet another, hideously inept, "Golly, if only our leaders behaved like this!" one act Barbie-and-Ken puppet show in which Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Barack Obama and Harry Reid all extol the Mighty, Mighty Virtues of Centrism.

First, Boehner sobers up long enough to deliver a heroically heartwarming, Centrist sermon that would send Frank Capra into a sugar coma. After which;

"President Obama warmly embraced Mr. Boehner and then took the podium..."

After which President Obama completes the race to the Imaginary Center of Tom Friedman's masturbatory dreams and delivers a cuddly, complimentary converso-mirror-oppositish speech:

"Speaker Boehner and Senator McConnell, thank you for your commitment to act in our nation’s highest interests. Let me say publicly what I committed to you privately: I have asked Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson to revive their deficit commission and to use their recommendations for how to cut spending and raise revenues as the starting point for our negotiations. But it will now be called ‘The National Commission for American Renewal.’"

After which they all play naked Twister, enjoy a Fresca and then leap into The Mystery Machine

to race across America, solving crimes, unfucking up the gummint, and drying every tear.

"One minute later, the New York Stock Exchange opened. The Dow was up 1,223 points at the open — an all-time record.

What’s sad is how much this is a fantasy and how easily — with just a little political will — it could be a reality."

You know what's really, really sad?

That week-in, week-out Tom Friedman actually gets paid actual money by the New York Times to fountain this Centrist tapioca claptrap straight out of his clueless hacktacular ass.

Who are not "Conservative"

The Pope of All "Conservatism" adds another name to his "Hot/Not" Papal Bull:

John Derbyshire reacts to the riots in classic form...

And so the reactionary joins the criminal. It's a useful reminder that whatever Derb is (candid tonic? pub bore?), he is not a conservative. He hates the status quo.

In Mr. Sullivan's Universe, you will remember, "Conservatism" has never amounted to much more than, "People who agree with me at the moment" plus "Oh, shiny!"

It is a cozy little frathouse where Mr. Sullivan gets the inconvenient stink of the lunatic Conservative multitudes out of his pure, imaginary Conservatism in exactly the same way Bill O'Reilly gets the inconvenient stink of the murderous Christian lunatics out of his pure, imaginary Christianity:

by wish-wish-wishing them awayyyyyy.

This is also why people like Mr. Sullivan do not debate these sorts of issues in public.

Because they would be eviscerated.

Spoiler Alert: If, over the last 44 years, you have somehow missed the 1967 science fiction classic "Five Million Years to Earth", please note that this is the final segment of that movie.

This week with an extra ration of "Rachel the Damn Liar Slayer", which was nice.

First, of course, Grandpa Walnuts (Senator, TeeVee Land)

had to be trotted out for the 14,275th time to lie and dribble and blink like a tarsier being hurled into the Sun

(Although it was gratifying to see him once again trot out the Driftglass Federal Refinancing Authority Plan from 2008.

You're welcome!)

Then Rachel Maddow was up, and I'd like to report that she mopped the floor and painted the wall with the lies of the Right and the Center -- and she did -- but when I consider where our Beltway Conversation stood when Ms. Maddow went on "Meet the Gregory" in July of last year -- long before the Tea Baggers knew how to spell "Debt Ceiling" --

... [Then-White Hose Spokseman] Robert Gibbs (one of the the Lesser Brother's Gibb(s)) promised job growth in the Battery Sector (apparently, by 2014, 40% of our nation's Chinese-made sex toys will be powered by American-made batteries, so USA!USA!).
...

David Fucking Brooks wanted America to know that there are plenty of Moderate, Sensible (tm DFB) things we can do to make our descent into Conservative Hell more comfortable, but we won't do them because neither party is willing to give any ground on anything.

Shocking, I know.

...Blue Dog Wall Street stooge Harold Ford Jr. wanted America to know that if only Democrats would compromise a just liiiiittle bit more, and give Big Business just a few more concessions, we could maybe get some stuff done.

As they do every Sunday
The temporal ministers and agents of the Most Infernal

Were again free to stalk our nation's airwaves virtually unmolested.

As always, they smiled and licked their hungry lips
And hoped that, once again, foolish humans would stay mesmerized by their accursed words
Long enough for them to feed and feed and feed.

In the end, there are really only two ways to deal with a population of ravenous undead Conservatives running loose and draining the life out your democracy.

The first and wisest is never, ever to invite them into your democracy in the first place, for vampires are powerless until you open the door and let them in.

Once inside, however, the only other way to keep them from destroying every living thing is to stake those fuckers through the heart every single time one of them jams its grinning blood-drunk maw in front of a teevee camera and starts to lie to you, or abet one of its fellow liars in the act of lying to you.
...

I find my delight with her candor a tempered by the painfully obvious fact that -- one year later -- other than events repeatedly underscoring the fundamental accuracy of the Liberal critique of the American political system, and the fundamental nihilism of the Wreckers on the Right -- nothing substantive whatsoever has changed.

Our mainstream political discourse is a museum in a dead city full of humanish shaped plastic things running the same tapes over and over again.

Of course the Pope of All Capitalism was on hand to decline to predict what "The Markets" will do tomorrow.

I dunno what the fuck is going to happen next. Humans are weird. They behave in all these goofy ways that my Galtian Overlord Model didn't predict. I've read the last 700 pages of "Atlas Shrugged" over and over again and still can't figure it out.
Also too some shit is going down in Israel.

One more week of one more wingnut being asked to pull up a chair 'round the fire:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz Claims Tea Party Has 'Done a Lot of Compromising'
By David

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) says that the tea party should not be blamed for the political brinkmanship that led to S&P's downgrade of U.S. credit because they have bent over backwards to compromise.

"We have actually done a lot of compromising," Chaffetz told ABC's Christiane Amanpour Sunday. "Remember, it was the tea party that really spurred -- I was the primary sponsor of 'Cut, Cap and Balance.'"

"Wait a minute," former Obama administration "Car Czar" Steve Rattner interrupted. "'Cut, Cap and Balance' was not a compromise."

"Yes, it was," Chaffetz replied. "It was a raising of the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion. And what is wrong in this country is that we aren't willing to have the discussion about a balanced budget amendment."
...

One more week of one more GOP paid hack

...Alex Castellanos who just regurgitated one Republican lie-filled talking point after another during the entire segment.

One more week of Mouse Circus sockpuppets performing their essential duty for Empire: piling sandbags every higher around the Villager Centrist sensibilities against the rising tide of reality.

Rachel did great


but it also reminded me of how sad it is that we actually have to look forward to the Special TeeVee occasion when of a non-liar is invited to sit around the Sunday Morning tribal fire.

And how lonely gets running down that highway outside of Elmira Santa Mira, shouting the same fucking warning

year after year after year.

The Mustache of Understanding loots the lamest fortune cookie factory in America and calls it a day.

We learn:

"There is no easy, one-policy fix."

We learn:

"We need to cut spending in areas and on a time schedule that will hurt the least... "

We learn:

"we need to raise taxes in ways that will hurt the least..."

And, finally. Inevitably:

"The sooner we pull together the better. "

Not to worry, Tommy-boy.

I'm sure, in six months or so, America's Mighty Army of Centrism will have this all worked out.

John Solomon, the "editor of news and investigations for Newsweek and The Daily Beast" and one of the Village's many, many David Brooks knockoff copies, today risked professional suicide and startled the Media Establishment by leaping boldly into the fray to declare that, -- damn it! -- Both Sides Are to Blame.

And he doesn't care who knows it!


This:

"This time, political infighting cost America's its sterling borrowing rating—and both parties own the blame."

And this:

"There were lots of good options for sowing good will to an angry electorate and signaling a return to some form of political normalcy. But neither side could resist the temptation to just keep fighting."

And this:

"The ink on a compromise deal to trim $2.4 trillion from the deficit and raise the government borrowing limit was barely dry when both sides made clear they were digging in for a new fight over exactly how to implement the plan."

So...when exactly was that Golden Era of "normalcy" that you wanted us to return to, Mr. Solomon? During the Republican Lame Duck hostage crisis? During the Republican "Death Panel" freak-show? During the Republican "Let's filibuster every fucking thing?" spree?

I must have missed it, so why don't you point to the day on the calendar when the Right was anything other than fully committed to "standing on the Overpass of History lobbing cinder blocks into traffic" and then we'll talk.

Otherwise, Mr. Solomon, you're obviously just another fraud who figured out "How To Write a David Brooks Column" and turned it into a career.

Mr. Solomon's bio lists him as "the editor of news and investigations for Newsweek and The Daily Beast". In other words, one more "Both Side Do It" Villager meatstick who get paid to define what is and is not "news" for a vast, distracted and often unbelievably ignorant public.

Small wonder we are in deep, deep trouble.

The sooner people like Mr. Solomon are drafted into America's vast Army of The Long-Term Unemployed, the sooner we can get down to the business of cleaning up the toxic mess 30 years of Conservatism has left in its wake.

One by one, America's soft-handed, soft-headed life-long, keyboard-warriors of Ivory Tower "Conservatism" are being dragged -- kicking screaming -- towards the horrifying realization that they have been wrong all along about Real Conservatism, and that, just maybe, others people -- people they have spent a considerable about of time, energy and professional capital mocking and marginalizing -- have been right all along.

A few days ago, David Frum put a carefully hedged, question-mark-encrusted toe into that water:

Were Our Enemies Right?

...
When people tell me that I’ve changed my mind too much about too many things over the past four years, I can only point to the devastation wrought by this crisis and wonder: How closed must your thinking be if it isn’t affected by a disaster of such magnitude? And in fact, almost all of our thinking has been somehow affected: hence the drift of so many conservatives away from what used to be the mainstream market-oriented Washington Consensus toward Austrian economics and Ron Paul style hard-money libertarianism. The ground they and I used to occupy stands increasingly empty.

If I can’t follow where most of my friends have gone, it is because I keep hearing Susan Sontag’s question in my ears. Or rather, a revised and updated version of that question:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Which, among other things, is certainly a powerful proof-of-concept that nothing so sharpens the mind of an Ivory Tower "Conservative" as getting kicked out of the Wingnut Welfare chow line.

AEI hits David Frum where it hurts

Those Republican brutes! It’s bad enough not to tolerate David Frum’s dissent on health care -- especially since his judgments have been stunningly correct. But in ousting him after a mad overnight revolt among its donors, the American Enterprise Institute has put Frum’s family into precisely the health care hell that Obamacare seeks to remedy. What many people don’t realize about the think tank world is that the policy types who serve as modestly paid fellows do so in large part for the health coverage. In our antiquated employer-based system, middle-aged wonks simply have to be attached to a group to be insurable. If you and your spouse have reached your 40s and have had even modest health bumps along the way, you'll never be able to get coverage in the pre-Obamacare individual market (as my wife and I discovered and documented in this New York Times Magazine piece a few years ago).

Luckily for the Frums, big government is here to save them.
...

Talk about a two-fer. In one stroke, David Frum has become not only the poster boy for the Republican party’s incoherent tantrums, but for the need for Obamacare itself!

Real take men care of their families. Real men will crawl through shit to take care of their families. Period.

Ah, but what to do about the men and women who have been taking care of their families by selling poison and lies to the public for money? Who have made their daily bread by aiding an army of loathsome thugs whose political ideology is built on tearing the daily bread from the families of millions and millions of other men and women? Who have made their bones mocking and reviling those who fought on the side of the angels for "the least of these"?

For the sake of amusement if for no other reason, one thing you can do is wait.

Just wait...

Because in 3...2...1...

... that toe will be coming right back out again.

"Once more and with feeling: I am not a supporter of this president or his policies."

Morally malformed wads like the David "Axis of Evil" Frum cannot change: cannot hide Dubya's tramp-stamp on his soul or the reek of Cheney-Neocon-bitch on his flabby ass, and when he pines "If I can’t follow where most of my friends have gone..." he of course never mentions that his "friends" are only headed where it has painfully obvious the have been goosestepping all along.

He just expects the general public to be too uninformed about his contemptible history or to know what a complete ethical wind-sock he is for anyone to ever hold him accountable for anything he says or does.

Needless to say, he has a special place in Andrew Sullivan's heart:

Here

Frum celebrates the neocon high priest's deviationism. Of course I agree with both.

Here

Once again, David Frum says what needs to be said:

And here

As is obvious by now, I agree with [Frum].

Of course, its hard to keep track of which side of the waterfront David Frum is working during any given hour of the day, so it's hard to track which David Frum Mr. Sullivan is lathering over.

But as Mr. Sullivan's Ivory Tower "Conservatism" has never amounted to much more than "People who agree with me at the moment" plus "Oh, shiny!" I suppose it hardly matters.


Perestroika (literally: Restructuring) was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Its literal meaning is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.

Glasnost (Openness) was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s.

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy."

-- John Adams

Bonus Video: The goof who is so fudjooking desperate to hang on to his Centrist delusions that he makes up imaginary Crazy Leftists on the spot to counterbalance the genuine Right Wing fascist Rick Scott who is making his life Hell.

Never underestimate the how easily Conservative men can be led around by the nose out of fear that their Limbaugh-loving golf buddies might call them Big Librul Faaaaags.

Our ongoing thanks to Frank Chow for the graphic at the ProLeft website and The Amazing Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

Da' money goes here:

After spending most of his life bedding down with one group of narcissism-flattering imaginary invisible magic unicorns -- enlightened, stout-hearted, fiscally-responsible, socially-broadminded Conservatives -- Mr. Sullivan has seen the error of ways and leaped into the sack with an entirely different group of narcissism-flattering imaginary invisible magic unicorns: those intelligent, stout-hearted Centrists who (for some reason that is never revealed) have been in a coma for the last 30 years and never once noticed that their country was going up in flames or who was starting all the damned fires.

Those:

...pragmatic non-ideological Americans (who) are deeply worried about the short-term economy and the long-term debt and are trying to find a reasonable leader whom they can trust to thread the needle through both problems.

Who are polite enough not to call attention to his awful, awful past:

Forget the taxonomies.

Who really-really aren't imaginary! Really!

These people exist and I'm their Messiah one of them.

And who all live happily together in the same, tidy Halperinian/Brooksian/Friedmanian/Gregorian ideological cul-de-sac that just so happens to lie perfectly equidistant between that Crazy Right...

Do I find Palin or Perry or Romney more plausible on these questions than Obama? Nope.

And that Equally Crazy Left...

Do I want Obama to go all left-populist on me? No.

Mr. Sullivan concludes with one, final bit of mendacity:

But what I really am is just someone trying to be an adult and looking for an adult to echo this in office.

Mendacity because Mr. Sullivan is not an adult.

He is a dilettante, who wants to larking around on political Pleasure Island forever

and never pay the price.

A new, occasional feature examining the deathly hallows in which America's soft-handed, soft-headed, life-long, keyboard-warriors of Ivory Tower "Conservatism" have trapped themselves, and the various verbal gymnastics they are performing to avoid the horribly inconvenient fact that Conservatism -- their Conservatism -- has been killing this country for a long, long time.

Things have gotten so bad for them, in fact, that a few of them are willing to entertain the concept of political Perestroika:

Perestroika (literally: Restructuring) was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Its literal meaning is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.

As long as the don't have to put up with any God Damned Glasnost!

Glasnost (Openness) was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s.

In other words, lets not get all crazy about allocating blame and penalties for how fucked up everything is, or ; lets just all agree that I get to keep my well-paid media gig...and I'll stop calling you a traitor so often...and we'll both agree that Michele Bachmann is nuts.

Ok?

Uh, no. Not Ok.

See, to fix the country, we have to identify what is broken and how it got that way.

So lets start with something simple.

One sentence.

After twitching incredulously on about how Professional Conservative TeeVee Liar George Will had sure goofed up on a lot of, um, facts, Mr. Sullivan concluded thus:

So Will is simply empirically wrong.

No, Mr. Sullivan, George Will is simply lying.

In fact, George Will lies a lot.

In fact, as I am sure you could not failed to notice, a lot of Conservative pundits, journalists and public intellectuals lie a lot.

And more interestingly, our "liberal media" exacts no personal or professional
price whatsoever for this epidemic Conservative lying do they?

I mean, creatures as irredeemably corrupt and incompetent as Mark Halerpin and Newt Gingrich can spew the most outrageous, dishonest ridiculous and they have irrevocable Golden Tickets that grant them eternal access to the major American media.

Why is that?

Perhaps one day someone with access to the media decision-making process will name names and explain how it came to be that Conservative pundits, journalists and public intellectuals who lie were granted blanket and permanent absolution. And why other voices who aren't irredeemably corrupt and incompetent -- who have, in fact, been right about most things right along -- have never and will never be allowed within a 1,000 feet of a live Mainstream Media network camera?

To the extent this lying gets called out at all by anyone other that we crazy Liberal bloggers, it is invariably done in the most mumbling and passive way possible, and always weakened even further by the Ubiquitous Whiny Question Mark ("What could so-and-so be thinking?" or "Why would my-old-running-buddy-who-clearly-went-Full-Metal-Brownshirt-years-ago-but-to-whom-I-continue-to-drive-traffic say such a thing?")

Your-old-running-buddy-who-clearly-went-Full-Metal-Brownshirt-years-ago-but-to-whom-you-continue-to-drive-traffic says such things because he is a congenital Conservative liar.

And so-and-so is thinking "How can slither out of the very scary place my Conservatism has trapped me without admitting the horribly inconvenient fact that it is my Conservatism that ran me up on these rocks in the first place? Hey! Maybe I'll just lie my way out!"

As I have written before, this nation can no longer exist Half-Fox and Half-Fre

I am sure I will write about it again.

By Our Nails,

President Norquist and all his little helpers

stomps on our fingers and laughs and laughs.

There can be no peace between us anymore.

You are still not in it.

From "The Chicago News Cooperative" via that damn fine "Beachwood Reporter" site that all the kids are talking about:

Some City Council members on Wednesday questioned the high salaries that new Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is paying many of his freshly recruited Cabinet members.

The Chicago News Cooperative reported Tuesday that many top aides to Emanuel are being paid more than the 2011 city budget allocated for their salaries. (See the 100 highest-paid employees.)

Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd Ward) said he was unaware that new city officials often have higher wages than their predecessors in the administration of former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

“I think he better re-evaluate that,” Fioretti said. “We’re in a difficult budget time. He has told us over and over again that everybody has to share in the pain. Citizens are sharing in the pain, and the top officials should be sharing in the pain, too.”

Fioretti said he questions Emanuel’s commitment to making City Hall more transparent because his administration did not provide salary information to aldermen before releasing it to the public.

“We have a long way to go,” Fioretti said. “I’m hearing conflicting stories from some of my colleagues about how they’re being treated, and it doesn’t put things on the right foot immediately here.”
...

Every now and then I wander over to the brand new Fresnel lens that Da New Mare has mounted over the city government flea circus, just to see who's up, who's down, and how much everybody is making these days.

I can reliably (if anecdotally) report that most of the city workers I know remain hardworking civil servants laboring longer and harder than you would believe in a very demoralizing environment, punch-drunk from years of escalating furloughs, constant layoff threats, constant reminders that the new, MBA-driven regime (like the old, MBA-driven regime) thinks they are contemptible drones or expendable cogs, and the absurdly unrealistic expectations of bosses who know that the quickest route to their own unemployment is to say "No" to the next ludicrous demand from the 5th floor.

I can also reliably report that same useless, politically-shielded meat bags that were there 2, 5, 19 years ago are still there and drawing handsome salaries, while more than a few of those competent public servants have been driven out, burned out or laid off.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme clout.

This time around and right on schedule, it fell to the vapid, unctuous Charlie Rose to let one of the Villager's favorite naughty clowns

back out of the penalty box (h/t Harvey Chess)

I guess since David Gregory

was tapped to retrieve the little lost lamb de jour last time -- expertly fellating disgraced Republican pervert Newt Gingrich back to Beltway Respectability at the tail end of 2010 -- it's only fair that Rose would have to be the one to lay back and do his bit for the Empire.

I also note for the record that Rose performed his duty almost exactly one month to the day after Halperin fell from grace from the Village which (for what I assume are accounting and HR reasons) is now the standard time-out for bad little Beltway monkeys who get caught flinging the wrong brand of poo and which (were I a better writer) I might describe as "In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed/ Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love/ Over the nasty sty...".

Here are some highlights of the conversation (that included Peter Orszag, Al Hunt and John Heilemann) which includes a fairly exactly transcription, an occasional aside from me, and some stuff I threw in to be mean because, frankly, until I saw the video I had almost managed to blot from my mind exactly how much of a zombie-affected waste of carbon Halperin is.


First comes the pure, Centrist chum.

Halperin: I think you can say that theres the glimmer of the possibility of bipartisan cooperation, which we need on almost every issue that's facing the country today.

Halperin: Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner voted for the same piece of legislation today. That's a good thing.

Halperin: Very challenge facing the country now going to require John Boehner and Harry Reid and President Dick to have an agreement on how to dick thing forward...

Rose: Does Obama have a plan?

Halperin: He has one or two things he trots out every now and then. Increasing exports. Patent reform. But they all suck and the public will think they're stupid.

John Heilemann: This has all been very polite, but I don't have anything like the optimism
of Mark Halperin.

driftglass: the "optimism of Mark Halperin"? This is my esophagus, filling with vomit.

John Heilemann: This whole thing has been an embarrassment...and a spectacle, that has ended up with a deal that's a sham. An object lesson in eveything that's wrong...everything that's dysfunctional about Washington...Both parties...everyone has made a fool of themselves in this process.

John Heilemann: It's great that we didn't have a default, but default should never have been on the table in the first place. Neither side really compromised. Democrats were beaten into submission on a few issues, but no one gave to accomplish something great here.


Rose: Who are the political winners here?

John Heilemann: The only political winner I see right now is the Tea Party. ... Which came in with a very clear set of goals. They kept demanding. They banged their hand on the table and serially for the last three months Democrats gave in on everything that they wanted to the point where the Tea Party got 95% of what it was demanding.

driftglass: You will note that Heilmann doesn't even pretend to reconcile his two, diametrically opposed observations. That "neither side compromised" but that "Democrats gave in on everything that they wanted to the point where the Tea Party got 95% of what it was demanding". And that this was somehow the fault of both sides.

But out of this cesspool of failure and madness, Halperin finds a hero.

Care to guess who?

Halperin: For what [Boehner] was trying to do, I think he did a pretty good job. ,,, [Republicans] largely controlled the contours and the terrain of this deal. A very cool customer as he always is in talking to his members, knowing where the votes are. It's a credit to his experience and his demeanor.

driftglass: Sure Boehner knew where the votes were, because most of the time they were in Cantor's pocket, and Boehner had to beg like a dog and fail repeatedly to get his own people to follow him before Cantor let him touch them. But facts never penetrate Halperin's big, Lucite noggin.

Observe now Halperin's complete, psychotic incomprehension at the motives of human beings.

Halperin: Its still not clear to me how Democrats are living with themselves over this deal.
Because they control more of the government. It's still not clear to me why they gave in...

...except that they weren't willing to default.

That's right. Mark Halperin genuinely does not understand why someone would not be willing to blow up the world economy in order to win a political fight. Which is why his next statement is no big surprise.

Halperin: McConnell is the Big Winner of inside politics; of enhancing his status among elites.

Observe now -- when asked the question of whether the GOP will appoint Teabaggers to the Super Duper Congress and thus destroy any chance of any tax increases of any kind -- how Halperin instantly and completely reverses his own assessment of the wise and strong leadership of the GOP.

Halperin: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell would be killed by their Party if the appointed anyone with the least bit of squishiness on the question of tolerating revenue... I don't think they can appoint anyone moderate.

Hey, what about progress in the Super Duper Congress now?

Halperin: Gonna be tough because Republicans are gonna insist on burning "Obamacare" to the ground and pissing on its ashes, and the crazy Left probably won't go for that. Also dick, dick, dick, dick ,dick.


Halperin: I am mystified... Every poll shows that the public is completely sympathetic to the "balanced way" Obama was proposing. And yet the Tea Party sensibility dominated...set the table for the terms of the discussion.

Rose: What could Obama have done differently?

Halperin: Obama should have played golf with Boehner 18 months ago, and every month since. Then he [and here comes the psychosis again]...should have...found a way to win this argument!

Rose: How? How could he have "won the argument"?

Halperin: I don't know.... It's strange that on the central premise of the dispute, a great public speaker had public opinion on his side and couldn't make that animate the negotiations.

And this is where Halperin genuinely creeps me out.

Paul Krugman succinctly and clearly described the key elements of the Debt Hostage Crisis here:

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

But Halperin's brain simply refuses to process that information. It just goes on strike. And because Halperin is not very bright -- an automaton, really, with a standard-issue, linear, doctrinaire Centrist liar CPU and without so much as an ounce of nuance or subtly -- he just goes full HAL 9000 when confronted with facts that directly contradict the lies he is hired to tell.

It is impossible for a robot like Halperin to accept or even acknowledge that his pals in the GOP took the global economy hostage. Or that taking the global economy hostage is, y'know, a bad thing.

Because to accept or even acknowledge that his pals in the GOP had done what they did -- or that it wasn't, in the end, really Obama who was the failure because it was all just politics and as Wizard-in-Chief he should have been able to magically talk them out of it -- would completely annihilate Halperin's degenerate world view at a single stroke.

So instead we get Halperin, staring blankly at nothing, smirk firmly affixed to the front of his skull, giving the talk-show equivalent of this response

to questions he dare not even think about honestly.

But Halperin didn't call President Obama a "dick" even once, which means we can all look forward to the full restoration of his Elite Villager Status, along with all the perks and privileges appertaining thereto.

UPDATE -- And like clockwork...

Mark Halperin to return to MSNBC after suspension
By Lisa de Moraes

After one month in the dog house, political analyst Mark Halperin will return to MSNBC Wednesday morning, returning to the scene of his crime — “Morning Joe.”
...

Beyond insulting my intelligence, the absurd pearl-clutching peek-a-boo theater our media overlords enacted to tug on Mark Halperin's corporate leash using the pretext of a mildly naughty word does not really offend me.

The existence of Mark Halperin offends me on too many levels to count.

Who, like all of Conservatism's Good German Expatriates, somehow managed to miss every single gigantic warning sign about Brownshirt nature of the monster they were creating during all of the years they were prospering from the fruits of that monster's depraved labors.

And now -- once the monster he had been only-too-happy to wired up and turn loose to stomp on people like us had finally and predictably turned on him -- Frum runs in freaked-out little circles squealing "OMG! OMG! Where did this monster come from?! And how can "we" stop it!?"

From the irrepressible First Draft:

They Thought They Could Control It

David Frum, going, "I say, old chap, maybe inviting this frothing, flea-infested, mangy were-panther to our lovely garden soirée was a bad idea."
...

I mean, COME ON. Did you really not think you'd be lunch at some point? It's one thing to know it and have a death wish. People jump out of planes. People do all kinds of shit they know is dangerous as hell and it's kinda sexy to live that far on the edge, but only if you know. If you've got yourself a degree in Advanced Self-Deception and you think it is going to be okay to keep a zoo animal in your living room because it owes you something for naming and putting a little hat on it, I don't even know what to do with you. That kind of idiocy exhausts me down to my bones.

They nurtured these freaks for years. The entire apparatus of the sensible Republican Party of which Frum is so enamored, which started unprovoked wars and slashed necessary funding for programs that helped people but at least did it with pinky finger properly cocked, was RUN on keeping people like this chained to the machines.
...

Fuck him. And every one of Conservatism's Good Germans like him.

In any other profession, being that horribly fucking wrong about the very subject you are hired to be right about would be a career-ender.

Among the Conservative pundit-class it gets you promoted.

Or at least one big, ol' payday:

The 2011 Sammie Awards were held last night in Chicago.

CHICAGO – Tonight, the Sam Adams Alliance (SAM) announced the winners of the 4th annual Sammies awards. Nearly 400 guests, including John Stossel, Andrew Breitbart, and Brad Thor, took part in the celebration of ordinary Americans who take extraordinary steps to advance freedom. The winners from across the country were recognized for their engagement as watchdogs, reformers, messengers, and strategists
...

Ben Domenech of Alexandria, VA. Mr. Domenech along with Brad Jackson of Austin, TX won the $10,000 Messenger Award for their original and popular daily podcast, Coffee and Markets. With over 5,000 downloads each day, Coffee and Markets has quickly become one of the most widely listened podcasts on the right.

Yes, that Ben Domenech.

From "Pissed on Politics":

Ben Domenech aka Box Turtle
Posted by PoliShifter on 23 March 2006, 4:03 pm

The blogosphere was up in arms a couple of days ago over the Washington Post hiring conservative blogger Ben Domenech aka Box Turtle. He gets his name box turtle from The Subversive Intellectual Society in regards to the following.

[And as a speechwriter for Senator John Cornyn (R - TX), he [Ben Domenech] penned these immortal lines:

It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife. ]

The above was a bit in the war against gay marriage. Well it turns out that this Box Turtle Ben Domenech is a bit of a plagiarist as well as a homophobe.
...

From the "Washington Post":

Ben Domenech Resigns

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.

An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.
...

Heroes.

Heroes all.

is the absolute control over it." -- Paul Muad'Dib, "Dune"

For the last 30 years, the Right has been a Cult with the clearly articulated goal of destroying the federal government of the United States.

They are now within a hair's breadth of having enough power to do it.

It is not that this concept is in any way unclear to the averagely bright 10-year-old: it is that the Reasonable Center is either too fucking cowardly to face its implications, or they have professional/financial incentives to perpetuate the Big "Both Sides Do It" Lie that permits the Right to drag this nation steadily towards oblivion.

The original, vituperative foul-mouthed blogger on the Left.

"But the cosmogony of Genesis Teabaggerism is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical."

-- H.L. Menken Mencken, slightly modified

As the oil drums full of old people and students and working class Americans and all the rest of my fellow useless eaters are welded shut and tossed off the fantail of the Ship of State into the icy waters of Global Transnational Corporatism, I take a small measure of comfort from re-reading some of the best of America's working press from generations gone by.

You know, back when we had a working press.

All of this is from H. L. Menken Mencken in 1925; before, during and after the Scopes Trial which, I am sure you all remember, Clarence Darrow actually lost. The reason we remember Scopes as a victory of sorts for evolution and science today is because we had reporters like Menken Mencken who used the press to expose and mock the invincibly ignorant yokels who stood foursquare on the side of comforting lies, and the hucksters who used them.

Take it away, Henry Louis;

Menken Mencken on losing a rigged game to the yahoo mob:

All that remains of the great cause of the State of Tennessee against the infidel Scopes is the formal business of bumping off the defendant. There may be some legal jousting on Monday and some gaudy oratory on Tuesday, but the main battle is over, with Genesis completely triumphant. Judge Raulston finished the benign business yesterday morning by leaping with soft judicial hosannas into the arms of the prosecution. The sole commentary of the sardonic Darrow consisted of bringing down a metaphorical custard pie upon the occiput of the learned jurist.

"I hope," said the latter nervously, "that counsel intends no reflection upon this court."

Darrow hunched his shoulders and looked out of the window dreamily.

"Your honor," he said, "is, of course, entitled to hope."...

The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti- evolution law and the simian imbecility under it. There hasn't been the slightest pretense to decorum. The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions. The chief prosecuting attorney, beginning like a competent lawyer and a man of self-respect, ended like a convert at a Billy Sunday revival. It fell to him, finally, to make a clear and astounding statement of theory of justice prevailing under fundamentalism. What he said, in brief, was that a man accused of infidelity had no rights whatever under Tennessee law...

Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton. But it seems to me that he has nevertheless performed a great public service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way. Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law. There are other States that had better look to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates.

On the ambitious and dangerous demagogue(s) who lead them:

He can never be the peasants' President, but there is still a chance to be the peasants' Pope. He leads a new crusade, his bald head glistening, his face streaming with sweat, his chest heaving beneath his rumpled alpaca coat. One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities. It is a tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a hero and to end it as a buffoon. But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that lies in his black, malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice. He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no other man among us can shake and inflame them, and he is desperately eager to order the charge.

Still more on the reckless clowns who ride the mob to power:

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

On why trying reason with the mob is a waste of time and effort:

...Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men; they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of education; they themselves can't understand it. Ergo, its teaching must be put down.

This simple fact explains such phenomena as the Tennessee buffoonery. Nothing else can. We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive -- and a few are enough to carry on.
...

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex -- because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.
...

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.
...

On what Democracy's response to the mob should be:

"The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it."

Today we have no Menken Mencken.

Today we have Tom Friedman. Today we have David Gregory and David Brooks. Today we have Harold Ford Junior and Peggy Noonan.

Like the poor, some form of the yokel mob will always be with us.

But the continued existence of the yokel mob's lying Centrist media enablers is entirely a matter of commerce and choice.


UPDATE: I would like to promise -- as God as my witness -- I will never again bang out a post on horseback in a pre-dawn blur and then post it before leaving for day behind a firewall with a glaringly dumb typo staring me right in the face. A typo which I did not just make once and in the title, but carefully replicated over and over again.

I would like to make such a promise, but we all know there is no way in Hell I could ever keep it.

There is about a 12-hour-to-two-day lag between my editor brain and writing brain.

In that interval I am regularly blessed to find lessons in patience and humility, beautifully gift-wrapped and hand-delivered :-)