My sense is that if Jonah was ever sincere, it was before puberty. I haven't seen anything out of him since that suggests he believes anything he says, and you'll remember how hard I tried to give the dude a break.
I'm probably being unfair here. I mean, I get that he thinks he really did something with "liberal fascism". Unfortunately, what he did was an adolescent understanding of boundaries, like a sixth grader mad that they're not allowed to drink. I don't know if he outgrew it, but "Anyone who says something is for your own good is a fascist trying to control you" is the sort of essay you expect of the kid who got grounded for blowing up the mailbox because he was bored.
On "liberal fascism", no he doesn't. Now he's been NPR-washed he's let the gollum Dinesh D'Souza take over that beat and he'd prefer you not talk about it. It was never an idea anyway, just a troll ("Southern Democrats owned slaves, that proves you guys are Nazis, har har har") stretched out to 300 pages.
Oh, god. Well, that makes me feel sorry for him again. On the other hand, when you call Shapiro "The Virgin Ben" I get the impression he actually kinda likes it.
He's kind of missing out here, because the new red hat crowd would completely fall for it, ahistory and all. I mean, they're already civil war and Nuremberg Trials levels of outraged the government has the gall to keep them alive.
I have never been able to figure out what Dinesh's thing is. I keep expecting him to be smart. I do not have that problem with Jonah, sadly.
Like, *I* think it's hilarious that he's getting no credit for this shit. Because this is exactly what he appeared to me to be trying to say. But, maybe he knows he's a rake-stepper and has decided to limit his exposure. To be fair, knowing just how high profile you can get when you're inherently a clown is a talent that someone should have taught Trump. There's a reason McConnell hasn't declared bankruptcy six times.
Funny I hadn't thought about it til now, but "You should wear a mask and get vaccinated to protect you from this deadly respiratory disease" is TOTALLY Liberal Fascism. And the poor schmuck doesn't even have the nerve to demand royalties.
I am officially not looking this up. Because as broad as my tastes are, I do not want to even think about this. I like asses fine, but I think I'll skip this asshole.
Conservative arguments were always bullshit, but now everyone on the Right has been swept up by the ill wind of anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise, even -- ironically enough -- the intellectuals and experts themselves.
Also, Trump’s success has shown them any so-called “policy positions” don’t have to even sound like they make sense when you articulate them, and can be directly contradicted almost minutes later, and your supporters will be just fine with it. Because emoting a general resentment against the out-groups and rewarding (if only in an owning the libs kind of way) the in-groups are the only things that matter.
No “irony” involved. Using “five dollar” words, as my Dad used to say, does not constitute an intellectual proof without actual factual evidence or a provable proposition to defend, which they never even tried to make. (A country founded on the necessity of slavery is an economic dead-end, after all.)
I don't know how long I've believed it- I get a sense that I haven't always felt this way- but within recent memory I feel like the "thought leaders "on the conservative side don't believe anything except for what makes them Bank. They're completely soulless and the only real values they have are dollars and cents.
Somewhere on the Daily Caller Teams app someone just texted someone else ""Edroso called you Numbnuts"
I have always thought that the fact that Jonah Goldberg is considered a "public intellectual" amply demonstrates the mental bankruptcy of the current age.
"Welcome to Weekend Edition, I'm Scott Simon. President Biden ordered student loan forgiveness this week. Some are saying that his doing so is a reckless power grab designed to enslave the middle class, while others note that Biden is senile. Here to discuss the issue are NPR public intellectual Jonah Goldberg and New York Times columnist David Brooks. . . ."
Excellent post. I am old enough to distinguish between conservative, post-war thinking and writing/policymakinbg during and after the Cold War. A consensus of sorts existed between the Liberal and Conservative camps on the dangers of Soviet and Chinese “communism” for 40+ years based on the information (and massive disinformation) presented to the American public (quite aside from policymakers) about the “enemy”. Communism was clearly oppressive, inefficient, wasteful of human and natural resources and a dead-end solution to mankind’s economic efforts. I know, I worked a lot in this field and was impressed mainly by the adherence to the mid-century modern, bastardized Swedish look..
That situation, of course, largely ended with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since conservatives had always been tightly wound reactive and obsessive, the end of the Cold War resulted in the movement spinning and bouncing around like a plastic top, shedding bits and pieces of ideology all around.
That gave space for Gingrich’s inward looking Contract on America to promise deregulation and out-of-contol vicious and racist domestic policies without any resistance from the real world and so we are in this topsy-turvy world of right-wing ignorance that is heavily supported financially by the international oligarchy including, of course, the former Soviet Communists.
This intellectual and policy situation is wholly unsustainable and will come crashing down in terrible ruin and the conservatives secretly know this but continue to scream “Apres moi, la deluge.“
Some time after 9/11/01 it got in my head that the conservative anticommunists we’re not so much against the oppression but against the American conservatives not having the power to oppress like the Commies did. After the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration wanted to silence any criticism of their actions in response to the attacks, as I seem to remember Cheney and Ari Fleischer burbling out. There were other instances exemplifying this that I’ve forgotten, but recently, the anti-intellectualism, anti-scientific and art censorship tendencies have manifested themselves.
The Cons didn’t have the judicial and legislative branches populated with enough co-ideologues to pull off the power grab then. But they’re getting very close.
Yes. “We” (Liberals) have so far been saved only by our choice of opponents - knuckle-dragging, slobbering idiots than by any clever suasion method we have with John Q. Public.
"... wholly unsustainable and will come crashing down in terrible ruin"
I guess the trick is to figure out how it can be terrible ruin for them and not for the rest of us. Republicans blowing a made-to-order chance to pick up the House and Senate would be a good start.
Yeah, I dunno. Possibly just "WTAF". But someone in here has claimed "Irritable Mental Gestures" as their preferred form of address now, so thank you, Roy.
I sympathize with Roy. Yet while the details of the post are correct enough, I can't quite agree with his conclusions.
Firstly, because the people he's kvetching about are cogs in the Great Wheel of Repression, they're always fair targets for mockery.
As for conservative ideology: It's the one the nation was founded on: reducing the role of the state so that it never, ever interferes with the ability to accumulate. Nothing more. A tell is the incredible failure of the Articles of Confederation.
Any heavy intellectualizing like the Buckley/National Review project was, to a great degree, an artifice and performative. Having as a project exploitation of the general population (and old time Southern racism) can't be argued in good faith, only supported by bullshit of one kind or another. And while I'm overly generalizing here, a distant second in substantive conservative ideology is (was?) the opposition to commie states. But the real problem there was repression and bullying, that they didn't have unrestrained capitalism wasn't the primary problem. (And speaking of rank bullshit: The idea that free markets birth freedom. All I say about that is maybe we should try it for a generation and see what happens. Or not.) And if repression is the true problem with the commie states and not so much the economic systems, well, then, our conservative brothers and sisters have been pretty weak in that area.
Also working against the idea of conservative ideology is the true core of Trumpism: Making it safe for pols to echo the idiocy, delusions, insanities, etc., etc., etc., of conservative media.
So: No real ideology to spew -- positions, yes, sure, but a developed ideology, nah -- just performative bullshit.
So, we're back to mocking that.
But taking the ideology seriously as an ideology, please, no. Not worth it, never was. Or if it is, if one wants to piss in the wind, it should be left to the young so they can have a life lesson and learn better than to engage.
Those capable of reasoned arguments and such pretty much support the GOP for financial reasons, those in the base not really in it for the money mostly don't deal with reasoned arguments. They have beliefs that they want echoed and reinforced. Not at all in it for intellectual expansions or whatever. So, again, no reason for anything other than bullshit -- not that they're really is anything else.
Or maybe leave it to the Republican operative controlled Forward party.
Excellent writing. My first reaction on reading excerpts of Alito's decision was that so much of it was exactly in the style of right-wing talk radio (as was so much of Scalia's writing)*. The success of Limbaugh and his epigones taught them all that even the veneer of rational thinking or the pretense of intellectual rigor was completely unnecessary. You don't even need a party platform! Of course, then Trump revealed that the manhole covers had been completely thrown off -- the sewers are wide open! Crawl out and let your freak flag fly!
*As with his concurring opinion in Bruen: "Ha ha. Libtards think gun regs will prevent mass murder. Oh yeah? What about that shooting in Buffalo? Those New York laws didn't stop that one, did it? Ha ha! Suck it, Breyer!"
(Okay, I translated it back into the original talk-radio, but the gist is there.)
Talbott rightly focused on “Lemme find some historical justification for fucking you over” Alito, but the fact is, none of the Hateful Six is intelligent enough to be handed the keys of a school bus, much less the country’s future. Looking through the transcripts of the Q&As for recent disasterous decisions it’s plain that their mental machinery is suitable only for slicing and dicing the words of legal “reasoning” without a glimmer of awareness that there were good and bad motives in past jurisprudence and they have fallen deeply into the bad end of that tradition. Factual knowledge of the world beyond their cloistered halls is minimal and erroneous. Their appreciation of moral reasoning stops somewhere around Leviticus. But here’s the thing: legal abortion, same sex marriage, contraception, and gun restrictions became majority positions among normal Americans because the evidence is all on their side. Scraping through the legal and religious blather to find ways to justify taking down those positions unsurprisingly results in rejection of the Court and in the desire to wrest away their self-appointed control of the country’s future. Meanwhile, Pope Francis has taken a page from the Federalist Society and larded the College of Cardinals with liberals, so Alito will never see a Pope who agrees with his idea of the Church.
Speaking of Hillsdale, the chief of staff of our Governor, the Phony on a Pony, is from Hillsdale, and our state’s educational curriculum has been rewritten with Hillsdale material.
I saw an attack ad on Noem's opponent recently. She called him the most liberal person in the State Legislature. Well the state legislature has 11 Democrats in 105 possible positions, so being the most liberal of the 11 is not that difficult. Also state Democratic leaders are mostly Republican-lite, moderate conservatives who complain the national party has left them, i.e. Mike Huether
I went to college with the Dem Governor candidate and his wife. They’re good people and don’t deserve the nastiness the Repugs are going to sling at them.
My in-laws gave to many Catholic charities, and were on many mailing lists. One of them was the Hillsdale College newsletter, and it is batshit insane.
the Josh Hammer incident is so cool: defines biblical justice as "rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies", realizes under critical fire that that is really not kosher and changes it to "rewarding good and punishing evil".
Clarifying the intended subtext, not what he wants to say, but what he wants his audience to hear: Justice is rewarding Republicans and punishing Democrats.
I am still surprised we made it through four years of Trump without him announcing to some talk show host that what he's planning on doing is firing all the democrats.Because it surely seemed to him unfair that he couldn't pack the entire government with his buddies and donors, and I don't know how the hell they kept him from saying that out loud like it was a brilliant new life hack no one had ever thought of.
This is why I fear DeSantis. If Trump had had any interest in anything other than money and fame, or had had better puppet masters, we wouldn't still be on the verge of losing our democracy, we'd be done.
Yes, DeSantis actually does fire Democrats. Just this week I was reading he did not like some school board, so he removed its four elected Democrats and installed Republicans. Imagine a governor doing that to your town... Imagine that governor running for president...
An effort was made to fire all the democrats, acquaintances in the bureaucracy inform me. A very definite effort was made to get the professionals out on trumped-up charges, or simply by making daily life so hellish they would quit. I think the news covered semi-thoroughly how State was gutted -- because of course, if you want to run foreign policy like a mafia don demanding favors, it won't do to have actual diplomats cautioning you about why that might hurt the national interest in the medium and long run. And so on -- Agriculture got hosed, Education maybe as well. I think Energy was only saved by the fact that the dope installed to gut it, Perry, turned out to be bright enough to realize that it did a lot of crucial stuff, so he went off the reservation and actually did his job.
Yeah, I know Miller and several others went after it. And if Trump found a democrat he could get rid of I'm sure he tried. But considering how often and how close he came to shit like "America is only for republicans" I still marvel that he never just announced he was replacing all the civil servants. He'd have lost interest after Fox stopped talking about it, but it amazes me he didn't go "Wait, this is the best lifehack ever, and I'm the guy who came up with it because I'm brilliant and everyone else doesn't understand business."
It seems to me that, from the founding of National Review, conservatism was based on two axioms: A) Conservative economics *would benefit everyone* and B) Communism was bad. And Communism *was* bad. But once the Soviet Union collapsed, B had no more salience. All they were left with was A. And, time and time again and again and a-fucking-gain, it's proved wrong. Conservative economics only benefits the wealthy, and leads to crashes, bubbles, and farcical corruption.
So what else can conservative "thought" be at this point, but mere propaganda? Forget "is it true?" It doesn't even have to be plausible. Conservative thought--the op-eds, the books, the essays, the speeches in the Senate and the House--is one big ad campaign. The client is corporations and the 1 percent. And, like most advertising, the object isn't to convince. It's to cloud men's minds and prod them to give in to emotion and impulse. Trump isn't an anomaly. He's the natural successor to William F. Buckley, the chief salesman of a drastically degraded product, talking to a drastically degraded customer base.
Yeah. That's why they keep calling Democrats -- watery, neo-liberal Democrats! -- "communists." It has no salience outside their geriatric and true-believer community -- now even middle-aged people have no meaningful memory of the Cold War. Still they keep trying to associate any kind of social aid to Soviet communism and expect a round of applause for it.
One thing that's also changed since the fall of the Soviet Union is a growing recognition that a large, active government is just part of the deal of being an economically advanced 21st-century nation. It's driving them crazy.
(Periodic reminder that William F. Buckley's brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. dragged his family to Franco's Spain to live because America wasn't fascist enough for him.)
My sense is that if Jonah was ever sincere, it was before puberty. I haven't seen anything out of him since that suggests he believes anything he says, and you'll remember how hard I tried to give the dude a break.
They're a lot less funny these days, though.
I'm probably being unfair here. I mean, I get that he thinks he really did something with "liberal fascism". Unfortunately, what he did was an adolescent understanding of boundaries, like a sixth grader mad that they're not allowed to drink. I don't know if he outgrew it, but "Anyone who says something is for your own good is a fascist trying to control you" is the sort of essay you expect of the kid who got grounded for blowing up the mailbox because he was bored.
"Take that, fascist government overlords!"
On "liberal fascism", no he doesn't. Now he's been NPR-washed he's let the gollum Dinesh D'Souza take over that beat and he'd prefer you not talk about it. It was never an idea anyway, just a troll ("Southern Democrats owned slaves, that proves you guys are Nazis, har har har") stretched out to 300 pages.
Oh, god. Well, that makes me feel sorry for him again. On the other hand, when you call Shapiro "The Virgin Ben" I get the impression he actually kinda likes it.
He's kind of missing out here, because the new red hat crowd would completely fall for it, ahistory and all. I mean, they're already civil war and Nuremberg Trials levels of outraged the government has the gall to keep them alive.
I have never been able to figure out what Dinesh's thing is. I keep expecting him to be smart. I do not have that problem with Jonah, sadly.
Like, *I* think it's hilarious that he's getting no credit for this shit. Because this is exactly what he appeared to me to be trying to say. But, maybe he knows he's a rake-stepper and has decided to limit his exposure. To be fair, knowing just how high profile you can get when you're inherently a clown is a talent that someone should have taught Trump. There's a reason McConnell hasn't declared bankruptcy six times.
Funny I hadn't thought about it til now, but "You should wear a mask and get vaccinated to protect you from this deadly respiratory disease" is TOTALLY Liberal Fascism. And the poor schmuck doesn't even have the nerve to demand royalties.
I'll be harsh. Dinesh's thing is Colorstruck Grifter.
I though Dinesh's thing was dipping his wick where it doesn't belong
I am officially not looking this up. Because as broad as my tastes are, I do not want to even think about this. I like asses fine, but I think I'll skip this asshole.
Conservative arguments were always bullshit, but now everyone on the Right has been swept up by the ill wind of anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise, even -- ironically enough -- the intellectuals and experts themselves.
Also, Trump’s success has shown them any so-called “policy positions” don’t have to even sound like they make sense when you articulate them, and can be directly contradicted almost minutes later, and your supporters will be just fine with it. Because emoting a general resentment against the out-groups and rewarding (if only in an owning the libs kind of way) the in-groups are the only things that matter.
No “irony” involved. Using “five dollar” words, as my Dad used to say, does not constitute an intellectual proof without actual factual evidence or a provable proposition to defend, which they never even tried to make. (A country founded on the necessity of slavery is an economic dead-end, after all.)
Oops! Commented, first, read this after.
Obviously, pretty much fully agree.
I don't know how long I've believed it- I get a sense that I haven't always felt this way- but within recent memory I feel like the "thought leaders "on the conservative side don't believe anything except for what makes them Bank. They're completely soulless and the only real values they have are dollars and cents.
Somewhere on the Daily Caller Teams app someone just texted someone else ""Edroso called you Numbnuts"
I have always thought that the fact that Jonah Goldberg is considered a "public intellectual" amply demonstrates the mental bankruptcy of the current age.
"Welcome to Weekend Edition, I'm Scott Simon. President Biden ordered student loan forgiveness this week. Some are saying that his doing so is a reckless power grab designed to enslave the middle class, while others note that Biden is senile. Here to discuss the issue are NPR public intellectual Jonah Goldberg and New York Times columnist David Brooks. . . ."
“We present a full range of viewpoints, from Laura Ingraham to Laura Loomer.”
Then sit back and rest on our Lauras.
Like those nuanced Wyoming Republicans I read about in a recent NYT op ed.
Alan Simpson and the Cheneys. Truly, moderates all.
Can't we all simply agree to rue the publication of J's "intellect"?
Excellent post. I am old enough to distinguish between conservative, post-war thinking and writing/policymakinbg during and after the Cold War. A consensus of sorts existed between the Liberal and Conservative camps on the dangers of Soviet and Chinese “communism” for 40+ years based on the information (and massive disinformation) presented to the American public (quite aside from policymakers) about the “enemy”. Communism was clearly oppressive, inefficient, wasteful of human and natural resources and a dead-end solution to mankind’s economic efforts. I know, I worked a lot in this field and was impressed mainly by the adherence to the mid-century modern, bastardized Swedish look..
That situation, of course, largely ended with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since conservatives had always been tightly wound reactive and obsessive, the end of the Cold War resulted in the movement spinning and bouncing around like a plastic top, shedding bits and pieces of ideology all around.
That gave space for Gingrich’s inward looking Contract on America to promise deregulation and out-of-contol vicious and racist domestic policies without any resistance from the real world and so we are in this topsy-turvy world of right-wing ignorance that is heavily supported financially by the international oligarchy including, of course, the former Soviet Communists.
This intellectual and policy situation is wholly unsustainable and will come crashing down in terrible ruin and the conservatives secretly know this but continue to scream “Apres moi, la deluge.“
Some time after 9/11/01 it got in my head that the conservative anticommunists we’re not so much against the oppression but against the American conservatives not having the power to oppress like the Commies did. After the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration wanted to silence any criticism of their actions in response to the attacks, as I seem to remember Cheney and Ari Fleischer burbling out. There were other instances exemplifying this that I’ve forgotten, but recently, the anti-intellectualism, anti-scientific and art censorship tendencies have manifested themselves.
The Cons didn’t have the judicial and legislative branches populated with enough co-ideologues to pull off the power grab then. But they’re getting very close.
"There were other instances exemplifying this that I’ve forgotten"
Tell me about it...
Yes. “We” (Liberals) have so far been saved only by our choice of opponents - knuckle-dragging, slobbering idiots than by any clever suasion method we have with John Q. Public.
OMG! John Public is Q!!!
"... wholly unsustainable and will come crashing down in terrible ruin"
I guess the trick is to figure out how it can be terrible ruin for them and not for the rest of us. Republicans blowing a made-to-order chance to pick up the House and Senate would be a good start.
Intellectual poseurs, catapulting fascism, in support of treason, and funded by dictators. Same as it ever was.
Tried, true, rinse, repeat.
"“irritable mental gestures” is so inclusive, succinct and pure that I will never try to parboil the cons' game any further...
and, needless to write, a band name of note...
Unhand it. It's my autobio title!
I thought your autobiography title would be "We Come In Peace?"
Yeah, I dunno. Possibly just "WTAF". But someone in here has claimed "Irritable Mental Gestures" as their preferred form of address now, so thank you, Roy.
I sympathize with Roy. Yet while the details of the post are correct enough, I can't quite agree with his conclusions.
Firstly, because the people he's kvetching about are cogs in the Great Wheel of Repression, they're always fair targets for mockery.
As for conservative ideology: It's the one the nation was founded on: reducing the role of the state so that it never, ever interferes with the ability to accumulate. Nothing more. A tell is the incredible failure of the Articles of Confederation.
Any heavy intellectualizing like the Buckley/National Review project was, to a great degree, an artifice and performative. Having as a project exploitation of the general population (and old time Southern racism) can't be argued in good faith, only supported by bullshit of one kind or another. And while I'm overly generalizing here, a distant second in substantive conservative ideology is (was?) the opposition to commie states. But the real problem there was repression and bullying, that they didn't have unrestrained capitalism wasn't the primary problem. (And speaking of rank bullshit: The idea that free markets birth freedom. All I say about that is maybe we should try it for a generation and see what happens. Or not.) And if repression is the true problem with the commie states and not so much the economic systems, well, then, our conservative brothers and sisters have been pretty weak in that area.
Also working against the idea of conservative ideology is the true core of Trumpism: Making it safe for pols to echo the idiocy, delusions, insanities, etc., etc., etc., of conservative media.
So: No real ideology to spew -- positions, yes, sure, but a developed ideology, nah -- just performative bullshit.
So, we're back to mocking that.
But taking the ideology seriously as an ideology, please, no. Not worth it, never was. Or if it is, if one wants to piss in the wind, it should be left to the young so they can have a life lesson and learn better than to engage.
Those capable of reasoned arguments and such pretty much support the GOP for financial reasons, those in the base not really in it for the money mostly don't deal with reasoned arguments. They have beliefs that they want echoed and reinforced. Not at all in it for intellectual expansions or whatever. So, again, no reason for anything other than bullshit -- not that they're really is anything else.
Or maybe leave it to the Republican operative controlled Forward party.
And as for it being impolitic to laugh at Jonah and his wail, the slow, sad head-shaking laugh was invented for just this sort of idiot.
Now that the scales are fallen from your eyes, Roy, just do what needs doing to preserve your incisive lizard brain.
Save the komodo dragon!
Excellent writing. My first reaction on reading excerpts of Alito's decision was that so much of it was exactly in the style of right-wing talk radio (as was so much of Scalia's writing)*. The success of Limbaugh and his epigones taught them all that even the veneer of rational thinking or the pretense of intellectual rigor was completely unnecessary. You don't even need a party platform! Of course, then Trump revealed that the manhole covers had been completely thrown off -- the sewers are wide open! Crawl out and let your freak flag fly!
*As with his concurring opinion in Bruen: "Ha ha. Libtards think gun regs will prevent mass murder. Oh yeah? What about that shooting in Buffalo? Those New York laws didn't stop that one, did it? Ha ha! Suck it, Breyer!"
(Okay, I translated it back into the original talk-radio, but the gist is there.)
Talbott rightly focused on “Lemme find some historical justification for fucking you over” Alito, but the fact is, none of the Hateful Six is intelligent enough to be handed the keys of a school bus, much less the country’s future. Looking through the transcripts of the Q&As for recent disasterous decisions it’s plain that their mental machinery is suitable only for slicing and dicing the words of legal “reasoning” without a glimmer of awareness that there were good and bad motives in past jurisprudence and they have fallen deeply into the bad end of that tradition. Factual knowledge of the world beyond their cloistered halls is minimal and erroneous. Their appreciation of moral reasoning stops somewhere around Leviticus. But here’s the thing: legal abortion, same sex marriage, contraception, and gun restrictions became majority positions among normal Americans because the evidence is all on their side. Scraping through the legal and religious blather to find ways to justify taking down those positions unsurprisingly results in rejection of the Court and in the desire to wrest away their self-appointed control of the country’s future. Meanwhile, Pope Francis has taken a page from the Federalist Society and larded the College of Cardinals with liberals, so Alito will never see a Pope who agrees with his idea of the Church.
Speaking of Hillsdale, the chief of staff of our Governor, the Phony on a Pony, is from Hillsdale, and our state’s educational curriculum has been rewritten with Hillsdale material.
I saw an attack ad on Noem's opponent recently. She called him the most liberal person in the State Legislature. Well the state legislature has 11 Democrats in 105 possible positions, so being the most liberal of the 11 is not that difficult. Also state Democratic leaders are mostly Republican-lite, moderate conservatives who complain the national party has left them, i.e. Mike Huether
I went to college with the Dem Governor candidate and his wife. They’re good people and don’t deserve the nastiness the Repugs are going to sling at them.
Went to COLLEGE? Well, we can be sure that will be showing up in a Republican attack ad soon enough.
My in-laws gave to many Catholic charities, and were on many mailing lists. One of them was the Hillsdale College newsletter, and it is batshit insane.
“ his prose… became so gassy it became an ordeal to spelunk it for jokes.”
Like Uranus, Goldberg’s product is big, gassy, and hostile to human life.
To be fair, aren't we all, from time to time?
the Josh Hammer incident is so cool: defines biblical justice as "rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies", realizes under critical fire that that is really not kosher and changes it to "rewarding good and punishing evil".
Clarifying the intended subtext, not what he wants to say, but what he wants his audience to hear: Justice is rewarding Republicans and punishing Democrats.
with extreme prejudice
AKA "the spoils system".
"Alexa, tell me what the Pendleton Act of 1883 is and why it was passed."
I am still surprised we made it through four years of Trump without him announcing to some talk show host that what he's planning on doing is firing all the democrats.Because it surely seemed to him unfair that he couldn't pack the entire government with his buddies and donors, and I don't know how the hell they kept him from saying that out loud like it was a brilliant new life hack no one had ever thought of.
And with the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts intact. Saved by sheer laziness.
This is why I fear DeSantis. If Trump had had any interest in anything other than money and fame, or had had better puppet masters, we wouldn't still be on the verge of losing our democracy, we'd be done.
Yes, DeSantis actually does fire Democrats. Just this week I was reading he did not like some school board, so he removed its four elected Democrats and installed Republicans. Imagine a governor doing that to your town... Imagine that governor running for president...
An effort was made to fire all the democrats, acquaintances in the bureaucracy inform me. A very definite effort was made to get the professionals out on trumped-up charges, or simply by making daily life so hellish they would quit. I think the news covered semi-thoroughly how State was gutted -- because of course, if you want to run foreign policy like a mafia don demanding favors, it won't do to have actual diplomats cautioning you about why that might hurt the national interest in the medium and long run. And so on -- Agriculture got hosed, Education maybe as well. I think Energy was only saved by the fact that the dope installed to gut it, Perry, turned out to be bright enough to realize that it did a lot of crucial stuff, so he went off the reservation and actually did his job.
Yeah, I know Miller and several others went after it. And if Trump found a democrat he could get rid of I'm sure he tried. But considering how often and how close he came to shit like "America is only for republicans" I still marvel that he never just announced he was replacing all the civil servants. He'd have lost interest after Fox stopped talking about it, but it amazes me he didn't go "Wait, this is the best lifehack ever, and I'm the guy who came up with it because I'm brilliant and everyone else doesn't understand business."
Terrific piece.
It seems to me that, from the founding of National Review, conservatism was based on two axioms: A) Conservative economics *would benefit everyone* and B) Communism was bad. And Communism *was* bad. But once the Soviet Union collapsed, B had no more salience. All they were left with was A. And, time and time again and again and a-fucking-gain, it's proved wrong. Conservative economics only benefits the wealthy, and leads to crashes, bubbles, and farcical corruption.
So what else can conservative "thought" be at this point, but mere propaganda? Forget "is it true?" It doesn't even have to be plausible. Conservative thought--the op-eds, the books, the essays, the speeches in the Senate and the House--is one big ad campaign. The client is corporations and the 1 percent. And, like most advertising, the object isn't to convince. It's to cloud men's minds and prod them to give in to emotion and impulse. Trump isn't an anomaly. He's the natural successor to William F. Buckley, the chief salesman of a drastically degraded product, talking to a drastically degraded customer base.
Yeah. That's why they keep calling Democrats -- watery, neo-liberal Democrats! -- "communists." It has no salience outside their geriatric and true-believer community -- now even middle-aged people have no meaningful memory of the Cold War. Still they keep trying to associate any kind of social aid to Soviet communism and expect a round of applause for it.
Well, I could scrape up the energy to proffer them an ironical slow golf-clap if they're really desperate for it.
One thing that's also changed since the fall of the Soviet Union is a growing recognition that a large, active government is just part of the deal of being an economically advanced 21st-century nation. It's driving them crazy.
(Periodic reminder that William F. Buckley's brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. dragged his family to Franco's Spain to live because America wasn't fascist enough for him.)