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Trump nominates anti-science, pro-coal goon for #2 at EPA
Objectively, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times is a cosseted Acela-corridor-dwelling mediocrity who has a long and well-documented history of being wrong about everything and yet makes a fabulous living spinning increasingly ridiculous fairy tales about American politics.
So, after so many years of being so very wrong about everything, why do The New York Times, PBS, NPR and NBC all continue keeping him on payroll and treating him like the High Lama of American Political Wisdom?
As Tali Sharot notes in her book “The Influential Mind,” when you present The New York Times, PBS, NPR and NBC people with evidence that goes against their deeply held beliefs, the evidence doesn’t sway them. Instead, The New York Times, PBS, NPR and NBC they invent more reasons their prior position was actually correct.
Mr. Brooks also says a bunch of other nonsense about the impossibility of anything ever changing until we have a -- surprise! -- grand Both Siderist Synthesis!
Today we need another grand synthesis that can move us beyond the current divide, a synthesis that is neither redneck nor hipster but draws from both worlds to create a new social vision.
Which will never happen because Liberals use facts and facts won't change anything -- including the Moloch-worshiping Gun Nut Party -- until the "culture war" ends:
Progress on guns will be possible when the culture war subsides, but not before.
Of course this is bullshit.
The "culture war" will never end. And yet, while Utopia was not achieved and will never be achieved, after our culture war's bloodiest major conflict, things did change when the Confederacy was destroyed and forced to surrender at Appomattox.
Thing changed after Brown versus The Board of Education of Topeka. They changed after the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They changes after Stonewall. They changed after Loving versus Virginia. They changed after Roe versus Wade.
Do you know how things don't change? By hiding out in your New York Times ivory tower, jerking wistfully off to The New Center's latest Both Siderist porn and collecting a paycheck by telling people they'll just have to wait until the Second Coming arrives with a Grand Hipster Redneck Synthesis in-tow.
Do you know how things do change? When decent people get angry and organized and force the indecent people to stop doing the shitty thing they are doing, whether those indecent people fucking well like it or not.
Former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos holds protest signs while speaking at the University of California in Berkeley last month. (NOAH BERGER/REUTERS)
At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life.
Yiannopoulos was a useful soldier whose very public identity as a gay man (one who has now married a black man) helped defend him, his anti-political correctness crusade, and his employer from charges of bigotry.
The Right has a long history of hiring psychologically malformed or self-loathing representatives of groups it despises and deploying them as stooges in order to deflect criticism of their carefully-cultivated, politically-energizing hatred for that group as a whole.
For example, the late Roger Ailes' sexual predator petting zoo at Fox News is still glutted with leggy female throw pillows who are only too happy to set the cause of women back a century or two as long as their employer keeps the money coming.
For example, if Andrew Sullivan hadn't spend his career marketing himself as America's only gay Conservative Catholic Tory stoner, no one on this side of the Atlantic would have paid him to do his little dance all of these years.
There is nothing new to see here.
These are the kapos who help the machinery of the American Fascist Party run smoothly.
And the very least they they deserve for their years of service is to be forced to spend the rest of their days wearing a sandwich-board that says "I Collaborated".
To save themselves and their co-conspirators and fellow travelers from being run out of this country on a rail, the goons and hacks and greasy little Luntzes who were present at the creation of the American Fascist Party (from the NYT, December 12, 1994) --
"Rush [Limbaugh] is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said.
-- and have greased it's filthy skids with our blood and treasure every day since, are now out in force trying once again to to use their privileged access to the the levers of political and media power to absolve themselves of the catastrophes which they created and from which they have profited so handsomely.
And this is why they hate us.
They hate us because we are the ones who know their terrible secret and keep blabbing it out loud to anyone who will listen.
Because we are the ones who know what it really means to invoke the "Both Sides Do It" lie. To profit hugely from selling this lie over and over and over again.
Because we are the ones who know what dreadful, soul-killing price in denial and delusion that lie demands.
Because we are the ones who know the true names of the silky, toxic demons they conjure with that lie, and the terrible power they cede to them every time they tell it.
Because we are the ones who tell the world the truth -- that when the invoke the Both Sides lie, they are begging those demons to please, please, please bury them alive and hide the truth at all costs away because they cannot bear to face it.
They hate us and fear us because in order to for the Both Sides lie to once and for all wipe their depravity from human memory and absolve the goons and hacks and greasy little Luntzes of all the evil they have done, they need to to be buried alive too.*
They hate and fear us because we are doing what journalists should have been doing all along -- seeing the goons and hacks and greasy little Luntzes who delivered our country into the hands of monsters for who and what they really are, and speaking that truth out loud.
They need us to shut the the fuck up.
And they hate and fear us because we will not shut the fuck up.
Report: Tillerson, Mnuchin, and Mattis have a 'suicide pact' where if one resigns, they all do
October 4, 2017
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson brushed off reports that he was close to stepping down over the summer, frustrated over President Trump's fast and furious Twitter fingers and insufficient staffing, and one U.S. official believes he knows why Tillerson didn't resign, despite his annoyance. The official told BuzzFeed News that Tillerson has a "suicide pact" with Defense Secretary James Mattis and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, meaning if any one of the Cabinet secretaries becomes the target of Trump's ire, all three will leave together. One way of getting on Trump's bad side would be by calling him a "moron," which NBC News says Tillerson did following a meeting in July at the Pentagon. When asked by reporters on Wednesday if he did call Trump a moron, Tillerson replied that he doesn't "deal with petty stuff like that."...
Golly, imagine if we'd found out the Obama Administration had...
...yadda yadda yadda...
...for the one millionth time.
Meanwhile, in public ol' OJT Tillerson is still sounding off that President Stupid is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being he's ever known in his life:
Because that's the price of playing for Team Evil.
I am going to skip on past most of the by-now predictable disaster that were The Sunday Shows. Which means no extended riff on Steve McMansion showing up in front of every camera in the land with his dead, doll eyes, wedge of black shoe-polish hair, Clutch Cargo taking face-hole and not a single human affect to lie and lie and lie about tax cuts.
Instead I would draw your attention to the panel which Mr. Chuck Todd assembled to talk about how utterly fucked up everything is, and how Donald J. Trump is a sociopath playing with matches in a bomb factory.
And the reason I would call your attention to this particular moment (and, later, to Mr. David Brooks' column in The New York Times today) is because, excluding Ms. Joy Reid, it a literal assemblage of representatives of the Three Fates of the Modern Conservative movement, all gathered together to collectively exonerate themselves for the horrors they have unleashed on our country.
Charlie Sykes was there as Clotho: the one who spent his entire professional career spinning the paranoid racist wingnut bullshit which now entraps us all.
Then there was Mr. David Brooks, whose whole life has been that of Lachesis, the dispenser of the bullshit. The man who launders the muck and filth that men like Charlie Sykes dredged from the dark heart of Wingnut America into something glossy and fine enough for the elite, influential audience who pay him a fortune to dispense comforting fairy tale about an Imaginary Republican Party that is as far removed from the actual Republican Party as Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars is from Andy Weir's The Martian.
And the thing is, nothing ever really changes in Mr. Brooks' writing. However many mountains of evidence pile up decade after decade that Red America is a toxic, ideological wasteland that is absolutely hostile to intelligent life, PBS and NPR and The New York Times and NBC all go right on paying Mr. Brooks -- who has worked very hard to stay as far away from Red America as humanly possible -- to go right on cranking out more reassuring tales of Tharks and Therns and Earthmen and Princesses and their colorful adventures on rugged, glorious Barsoom.
And finally, standing in for Atropos we have Danielle Pletka of The American Enterprise Institute: an organization which takes the raw filth and muck of the Right which Mr. Brooks then dispenses in Aspen Institute-friendly increments and cuts it all into tidy, despicable white papers and model legislation. And page by page they reverse-engineer one pseudo-academic justification after another for the sewage Charlie Sykes trafficked in, and the happy-clappy Beltway bedtime stories that David Brooks churns out.
But now that self-contained bullshit refinery has reached its logical end-state. It has fulfilled its critical role in building a racist, paranoid political base that is completely impervious to reason and fully-reprogrammable by demagogues like Limbaugh and Hannity and Trump and a political party leadership which is only interested in gutting government and eliminating taxes on behalf of the plutocrats who foot the bill for this abomination. Which means relentlessly pandering to that base. Which, in turn, means pandering to the whims of Limbaugh and Hannity and Trump.
Which, you longtime readers might remember, is an outcome which Mr. David Brooks once swore was impossible, and mocked Liberals for even suggesting such as thing as deranged:
Bush, as Advertised
FEB 5, 2001
What on earth has gotten into the liberals and the media? Perhaps affected by some sort of post-Palm Beach stress disorder, reporters and activists on the left have depicted George W. Bush as the leader of some sort of arch-conservative jihad. They've portrayed his tax plan as dangerously radical, some of his nominees as Confederacy-loving loons, and his voucher plan as a menace to the future of public education. To put it bluntly, this is all deranged. You get the impression that the left has actually started believing its own direct-mail fund-raising letters...
Just as he swore that there was no plutocat's hand to be found in any of this, and anyone who suggested otherwise was a dirty Commie:
Why Republicans Should Be Afraid
A lot can go wrong for them this fall.
JUL 29, 2002
...the Democrats seem to think that there is this organized entity called Corporate America, made up of senior executives, Republicans, white country clubbers, and people who were cheerleaders and prom kings in high school. If they can get the rest of the country to hate these people as much as they do, then they will win elections. Because they have this category in their heads, Democrats see the corporate scandals as tainting the whole Republican party.
But Americans who have not been suckled on the "Marx-Engels Reader" do not carry these categories around in their heads...
Turns out, the GOP really is funded by billionaire corporate thugs who will cut of the party's allowance if the congress they bought and paid for doesn't start cutting their taxes and killing off The Poors most rikki-tik. It's signature move -- massive tax cuts -- really are radical and dangerous. Their candidates really are elected by mobs Confederacy-loving loons. And they really do mean to get rid of public education, along with housing, the EPA, and anything other government program they can strip for parts.
In other words, the "deranged" Left was abso-fucking-lutely right about the Right all along.
And so, looking out at the burning wreckage that he helped create, what for David Brooks of 2017 have to say for his party now?
DAVID BROOKS: ... And Donald Trump is playing for the white identity party. And therefore, it's becoming harder, operationally, to be a Republican without suddenly siding with that. And so the other half of the party has to decide, "Can we side with a guy who's constantly dragging us into racial identity politics over and over again in a way that becomes offensive. I've been a conservative for 30 years, going to all these magazines, you never used to hear racial stuff at conservative gatherings." But now it's suddenly become very hard to be a Republican and not be somehow associated with something racially reprehensible.
Yes, David Brooks is literally saying that because no one ever said "nigger" at one of his Beltway cocktail parties within his earshot, the existence of tens of millions of committed racists within his Republican Party now comes as a complete surprise to him.
And please take special notice of his repeated use of the word "suddenly". "Suddenly" it's hard to be a Republican. "Suddenly" it has gotten difficult to not be tainted with all of this reprehensible "racial stuff."
No. What Mr. Brooks means is that, just two years ago, he still lived in a world where he could get away with publicly scolding Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates' writings about race in America as"dissolving the [American] dream under the acid of an excessive realism". What Mr. Brooks means is that people like him have "suddenly" run out of excuses and have "suddenly" been rousted out of their safe places to hide from the consequences of being the willing stooge of the Party of Bigots and Plutocrats for the past 30 years.
And what of our other two Fates?
CHARLIE SYKES: Well, you know, I mean part of it is you do have the people who just made the Faustian bargain that they're going to enable, that they're going to look the other way because they're going to get tax cuts. And then of course you have the orange Kool-Aid drinkers who are doing all of that...
That Faustian bargain paid for your house, Charlie. And your boat. And your other house. And your kid's college. How nice for you that everyone around the table has all agreed not to mention it!
CHARLIE SYKES: I think it's worse than that. I mean when you really think about it, what we found out is that Donald Trump himself cannot contain what he helped unleash...
What you helped unleash, Charlie. What you helped unleash. Again, how supernaturally decent of everyone around the table not to bring this up.
CHARLIE SYKES: So, here the Republican Party has really succumbed to this perpetual rage machine. And they can't turn it off. And not even Donald Trump could turn it off. So any of us that think that there's a policy answer for this, that there's just a few personnel moves, I mean this is something. I mean the beast has been released. And they realize that they can't ride it anymore...
I might be remembering this wrong, but wasn't "Perpetual Rage Machine" the name of your long-running, right-wing Hate Radio show, Charlie?
DANIELLE PLETKA: This is America jumping the shark.
No. This is your Republican party jumping the shark. This is your Conservative movement jumping the shark, This is the beast you built.
And of course, no Meet the Press would be complete without Shuck Todd on-hand to ask the really important questions:
CHUCK TODD: Do you fear too many Democrats are sort of intoxicated by the idea of, "Well, let's go with our own grievance machine?"
Which brings us, at last, to Mr. Brooks' column in The New York Times today. Or, rather, the razor in the apple. The lie Mr. Brooks carefully slips in to the middle of virtually everything he writes.
Trumpist populist nationalism is still a rising force within the G.O.P., not a falling one. The Bob Corkers of the party are leaving while the Roy Moores are ascending. Trump himself is unhindered while everyone else is frozen and scared.
As a result, the Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry. It is becoming the party that can’t govern.
Like his use of the word "suddenly" on Meet the Press, Mr. Brooks deploys the Present Continuous conjugation of "to become" ("is becoming") to signal to his readers and his financial sponsors that this whole fucking mess just happened, suddenly and out of thin air. That no one could have seen this coming...
...except, of course, for all the dirty Commie Liberals who have been warning about this exact thing for this exact reason for decades.
In the end, Mr. Brooks believes there is only one way forward:
Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity.
Actually, quite a lot of people have already arisen to point out that the Republican narrative of fear, hate and isolation is indeed "a deeply wrong and un-American story."
One big step in the right direction might be for Matthew Dowd to travel back in time a year or so and use his privileged position as ABC News' chief political analyst to pimp-slap the ever-loving shit out of any of his colleagues with a media platform who were playing the game of "Both Side Do It -- Disrupt! -- End The K'rupt Duopoly" between a political party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the fucking NRA (from the NYT, 04/28/17) --
Trump Tells N.R.A. Convention, ‘I Am Going to Come Through for You’
ATLANTA — President Trump received a thunderous welcome from thousands of gun lovers as he appeared here on Friday at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention to thank the group for its unwavering support of his presidential campaign.
A supporter of restrictions on guns before he entered politics, Mr. Trump became a fierce champion of gun rights during his bid for the White House, earning early backing — and $30 million in campaign support — from the powerful lobbying group.
“Only one candidate in the general election came to speak to you, and that candidate is now the president of the United States, standing before you,” Mr. Trump said. “You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.”...
-- and a political party that is not the wholly owned subsidiary of the fucking NRA.
Of course there are risks.
For example, the Butterfly Effect that may arise from Present Matthew Dowd blocking Yesterday Matthew Dowd on Twitter for suggesting that we can't just love, love, love the NRA away and that waiting around for the Party of Moloch to "evolve" on this issue is insane may cause the space-time continuum to cough up a hairball and Mr. Dowd to vanish in a temporal paradox fart.
