Dec 24, 2021·edited Dec 24, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso
Hear Hear.
You want to know who's lazy? The vastly overpaid fossil who regurgitates what is now a standard winger bullshit talking point. And she is months late to the party. You could read almost exactly the same garbage at Jim Hoft's shithole 6 months ago.
"grit through and suffer " - hag has no idea what any of that is about. Maybe she heard that from one of her boyfriends, critiquing their sex life as he was packing his bag to leave for good.
A Merry Xmas to all! Here in the right ventricle of America’s Heartland the performative cruelty of the pseudo conservatives who rule our land extends to the state supreme court which reached way up its ass to somewhere near its constitutional appendix to opine that gerrymandered districts shall remain as unchanged as possible so the Racistfascist Party can complete its task of turning the state into a cheese-fed version of antebellum Alabama. Jesus wept, indeed. Few are the citizens who appreciate the connection between America’s imperial militarism and its inevitable slide into fascism. If Hollywood had passed on Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” and instead made a blockbuster movie from his essay “Ur-fascism” (1995, NYRB), the scales might have fallen from more eyes. We face a future of vicious Josh Hawleys and moron Marjorie Greens, ill -equipped to fare any better than other over-stretched, undereducated empires. Of course, our barbarians are living here among us, not out somewhere in the dark and wild forests across the Rubicon. So, a hearty “fuck you” to Peggy Noonan and all the brownshirt essayists who make excuses for the authoritarians who hate comity and equality, and to all, a good night!
I'm old enough to remember Reagan's Amazing Tax Cuts that instantly produced the largest deficit the country had ever known--eclipsing even the deficit created by WWII. As a result, Reagan was forced to raise taxes almost every year for the rest of his presidency. But he did so in, um, clever ways.
To mask the size of the deficit, the Social Security Trust Fund was rolled into the general operating budget. Then, payroll taxes were hiked to help bolster the trust fund. Wealthy people do not pay payroll taxes, but working stiffs do.
Reagan introduced "user fees" for damn near every service that taxpayers were already supposedly funding. Suddenly it cost money to go to a national park or apply for federal permits, or even file an FOIA request.
But those taxes on the wealthy that he reduced were never restored. Republicans have long talked about how much they respect labor and how they're for "the working man." Their actions say otherwise, but working stiffs across the country have completely bought into it--so much so that you can now find plenty of workers who really, truly believe their their EMPLOYERS are overburdened with taxes and regulations. I guess lots of people want to believe that if G.I. Luvmoney gets a big enough tax break, perhaps Joe Average can enjoy the luxury of having the crust trimmed off his daily shit sandwich.
My less polite spin: Fame and fortune requires copying, as it were, in the first place; one's ability to have the FnF and be a meaningful critic is ~zilch. At that level, it's what in my crude way (#MyBrand) the Circle Jerk of the Highly Successful. (Maybe "fraternity's" better.)
As for Pegs, well, it's the Journal op-ed page which, before Fox News, was THE center of unhinged conservatism.
And back to the cruelty: Given modern conservatism's start with Buckley and National Review, is it really surprising? Too, given that all the GOP has had forever as selling points was a spew of hate and fear because doing good for the nation -- even during a global pandemic -- is something they're ~1,000% opposed to. And from hate and fear to sadism is a pretty small step as soon as one gets even the scintilla of license that Tubby, backed by party and non-Fox mainstream media, provides.
Of course a skilled prose stylist like Our Host would appreciate the sheer preposterosity of a sentence like:
“He is not a good man who became not a good president"
Using the phrasing of ancient postulates of dialectics, and the oh-so-elusive "Triple-secret-passive-subjunctive" voice, Hi-Noonan manages to nimbly tightrope over actual criticism, absolving all parties of responsibility, metaphysical or otherwise.
And this from the Party of Personal Responsibility? The grammar never lies.
Slight addendum to the theory: the D elite is well aware that much of the base of the GOP is arational and all that party has left after W is pushing racist buttons. But the "Liberal consensus" was predicated on the idea *those people* were too dumb to gain real power, and the natural order of things would ensure the Elites in both parties kept the lumpen enraged and sending checks, but no more. Their animus had to be hidden. Especially given in 1980 the US was <20 years from Jim Crow and compared really unfavorably to South Africa. There was a Cold War to win and you can't persuade the world you're the light of freedom if you can't turn the Stars and Bars into a mere lifestyle signal.
But the monster escaped and is now threatening to kill everyone. (Blah blah blah; lots of plot points.) Turns out the "stars and bars lifestyle" is as destructive in 1990 as it was in 1860. But while the D elite still thinks it's 1964 from a media-and-culture standpoint, the D base realized over the last decade or so that their arational racist frothing-at-the-mouth family & friends are in fact serious.
The key institutions - the cops & FBI, the D elite and the media, the universities and Fortune 500 and even the GOP elite - still believe *those people* are too dumb and disorganized to do anything. The rest of us, including the D base and the GOP elite, know better.
So the cruelty was always the point but it's taken a concerted effort by decades of D and GOP elites to pretend the US doesn't have a natural constituency for Fascism.
So it used to be that Americans could sensibly tough it out in times of adversity, such as… losing an election, right, Noonan? He was not a good man who—no no, “He was an obvious monster, elected by republicans anyway, and then he was a terrible President.” Just say it. Speak directly, instead of soaking the facts overnight in your rum language.
I do believe that the problem is that, during her lifetime, not enough people told Noonan to her face to fuck off. I'm not saying it would have done any good, considering the fog of Duggan's Dew it would have had to penetrate; it's just a comforting thought that the tissue-thin veneer of respectability on the desiccated soul of this black-hearted crone would at least suffer a few slings and arrows of profanity if nothing else.
tl:dr -- it's always lovely to see you eviscerate the witch.
Dec 24, 2021·edited Dec 24, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso
"Why did liberals pretend? Maybe because they still believed those old social studies curricula, with their vision of loyal opposition and worthy contention."
Maybe a little more than that, I want to say: the idea of democracy isn't that everybody's a gentleman, just that everybody deserves a voice regardless of gentility or (more importantly) lack thereof. Then, when you find there's a whole party or ideological faction that is literally evil, it calls the whole thing into question--apparently there's somebody who really doesn't deserve to be heard after all? it's an awful conundrum, and you want to not discuss it at all.
The resolution being, I guess, to recognize that the cruel faction IS the gentlemen, the self-regarding aristocracy and the people they can persuade to identify with them, and replace the moral issue (they shouldn't win elections because they're evil) with a political issue (they shouldn't win elections because they oppose majority rule, i.e. democracy itself).
Instead we keep letting them frame themselves as an actual majority (in fact a majority if you left out all the nonwhite voters, though they usually don't say that aloud) victimized by a "meritocracy" of overeducated civil servants and mobs of people of color. That's just a pantomime of democracy. The point of the cruelty is to make sure everybody knows they really have all the power.
The conservative project, post-Goldwater (and probably him too, but he couldn’t do it convincingly) was to completely lie about their goals and their intent. Their use of language to stir resentment and to cloud their real agenda can’t be overlooked. Nixon, Reagan, GW, Gingrich, DeLay, McConnell, Cruz Trump, are all, first and foremost, dishonest. Reagan lied the best. Nixon, oddly, seemed the most uncomfortable doing it (although he seemed uncomfortable doing everything), the GW administration lied so much even The New Republic caught on. Noonan’s lying here much as she has done for her entire career. Trump, of course, is the ne plus ultra of dishonesty. He does it so often and with every utterance that it’s removed the need for all these other assholes to bother hiding their true intentions — the last hold out might be the Supreme Court, and the last one in America who doesn’t know this is Breyer who zooms with these fascists everyday.
They’ve been so dishonest and scheming for so long, there is nothing real left of their ideology outside of its cruelty, stripped bare. They’ve even turned against the market as their magical talisman, it being too woke and lenient. Nothing good will come of the next political era, of course, and the relative merits of the liberal consensus one only sparkle in comparison to the depressing mash we are in.
But what I think will happen, and could happen rather quickly — something Sinclair Lewis certainly saw inherent in the movement and what he ended It Can’t Happen Here with — is how unhinged and unstable these vipers will be toward each other the second Trump doesn’t fully command the shock troops.
They want us dead or in pain, as subjects to mock and lord over, but when everyone in a lawless, power-hungry, fascist country wants what every other power hungry fascist wants? When there are no rules, no organizing principles, no charismatic flunky to “lead”?
First rate, Roy. And "Dame Noonington" alone is worth the price of admission.
Happy holiday, all.
Christmas came early, with the always-welcome gift of a first-rate Noonan take-down.
Since when would Ms. Noonan know anything about hard work?
Hear Hear.
You want to know who's lazy? The vastly overpaid fossil who regurgitates what is now a standard winger bullshit talking point. And she is months late to the party. You could read almost exactly the same garbage at Jim Hoft's shithole 6 months ago.
"grit through and suffer " - hag has no idea what any of that is about. Maybe she heard that from one of her boyfriends, critiquing their sex life as he was packing his bag to leave for good.
A Merry Xmas to all! Here in the right ventricle of America’s Heartland the performative cruelty of the pseudo conservatives who rule our land extends to the state supreme court which reached way up its ass to somewhere near its constitutional appendix to opine that gerrymandered districts shall remain as unchanged as possible so the Racistfascist Party can complete its task of turning the state into a cheese-fed version of antebellum Alabama. Jesus wept, indeed. Few are the citizens who appreciate the connection between America’s imperial militarism and its inevitable slide into fascism. If Hollywood had passed on Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” and instead made a blockbuster movie from his essay “Ur-fascism” (1995, NYRB), the scales might have fallen from more eyes. We face a future of vicious Josh Hawleys and moron Marjorie Greens, ill -equipped to fare any better than other over-stretched, undereducated empires. Of course, our barbarians are living here among us, not out somewhere in the dark and wild forests across the Rubicon. So, a hearty “fuck you” to Peggy Noonan and all the brownshirt essayists who make excuses for the authoritarians who hate comity and equality, and to all, a good night!
I'm old enough to remember Reagan's Amazing Tax Cuts that instantly produced the largest deficit the country had ever known--eclipsing even the deficit created by WWII. As a result, Reagan was forced to raise taxes almost every year for the rest of his presidency. But he did so in, um, clever ways.
To mask the size of the deficit, the Social Security Trust Fund was rolled into the general operating budget. Then, payroll taxes were hiked to help bolster the trust fund. Wealthy people do not pay payroll taxes, but working stiffs do.
Reagan introduced "user fees" for damn near every service that taxpayers were already supposedly funding. Suddenly it cost money to go to a national park or apply for federal permits, or even file an FOIA request.
But those taxes on the wealthy that he reduced were never restored. Republicans have long talked about how much they respect labor and how they're for "the working man." Their actions say otherwise, but working stiffs across the country have completely bought into it--so much so that you can now find plenty of workers who really, truly believe their their EMPLOYERS are overburdened with taxes and regulations. I guess lots of people want to believe that if G.I. Luvmoney gets a big enough tax break, perhaps Joe Average can enjoy the luxury of having the crust trimmed off his daily shit sandwich.
Whoa, wow, thanks for the triggering lump of coal, Maestro! Talk about a war against Xmas and holiday cheer and stuff...
As for the Q in the first part of the post, this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/23/problem-with-performance-centrism/
My less polite spin: Fame and fortune requires copying, as it were, in the first place; one's ability to have the FnF and be a meaningful critic is ~zilch. At that level, it's what in my crude way (#MyBrand) the Circle Jerk of the Highly Successful. (Maybe "fraternity's" better.)
As for Pegs, well, it's the Journal op-ed page which, before Fox News, was THE center of unhinged conservatism.
And back to the cruelty: Given modern conservatism's start with Buckley and National Review, is it really surprising? Too, given that all the GOP has had forever as selling points was a spew of hate and fear because doing good for the nation -- even during a global pandemic -- is something they're ~1,000% opposed to. And from hate and fear to sadism is a pretty small step as soon as one gets even the scintilla of license that Tubby, backed by party and non-Fox mainstream media, provides.
That said, Merry Xmas to the believers observing.
Of course a skilled prose stylist like Our Host would appreciate the sheer preposterosity of a sentence like:
“He is not a good man who became not a good president"
Using the phrasing of ancient postulates of dialectics, and the oh-so-elusive "Triple-secret-passive-subjunctive" voice, Hi-Noonan manages to nimbly tightrope over actual criticism, absolving all parties of responsibility, metaphysical or otherwise.
And this from the Party of Personal Responsibility? The grammar never lies.
Slight addendum to the theory: the D elite is well aware that much of the base of the GOP is arational and all that party has left after W is pushing racist buttons. But the "Liberal consensus" was predicated on the idea *those people* were too dumb to gain real power, and the natural order of things would ensure the Elites in both parties kept the lumpen enraged and sending checks, but no more. Their animus had to be hidden. Especially given in 1980 the US was <20 years from Jim Crow and compared really unfavorably to South Africa. There was a Cold War to win and you can't persuade the world you're the light of freedom if you can't turn the Stars and Bars into a mere lifestyle signal.
But the monster escaped and is now threatening to kill everyone. (Blah blah blah; lots of plot points.) Turns out the "stars and bars lifestyle" is as destructive in 1990 as it was in 1860. But while the D elite still thinks it's 1964 from a media-and-culture standpoint, the D base realized over the last decade or so that their arational racist frothing-at-the-mouth family & friends are in fact serious.
The key institutions - the cops & FBI, the D elite and the media, the universities and Fortune 500 and even the GOP elite - still believe *those people* are too dumb and disorganized to do anything. The rest of us, including the D base and the GOP elite, know better.
So the cruelty was always the point but it's taken a concerted effort by decades of D and GOP elites to pretend the US doesn't have a natural constituency for Fascism.
So it used to be that Americans could sensibly tough it out in times of adversity, such as… losing an election, right, Noonan? He was not a good man who—no no, “He was an obvious monster, elected by republicans anyway, and then he was a terrible President.” Just say it. Speak directly, instead of soaking the facts overnight in your rum language.
Well, I, for one, aren't worrying (that pandemic support makes people lazy) so she could be right when she wonders if a lot of people aren't worrying.
Well the one real issue I have with this is how do you figure Obama as Liberal?
I do believe that the problem is that, during her lifetime, not enough people told Noonan to her face to fuck off. I'm not saying it would have done any good, considering the fog of Duggan's Dew it would have had to penetrate; it's just a comforting thought that the tissue-thin veneer of respectability on the desiccated soul of this black-hearted crone would at least suffer a few slings and arrows of profanity if nothing else.
tl:dr -- it's always lovely to see you eviscerate the witch.
Merry, Happy, etc. to all.
"Why did liberals pretend? Maybe because they still believed those old social studies curricula, with their vision of loyal opposition and worthy contention."
Maybe a little more than that, I want to say: the idea of democracy isn't that everybody's a gentleman, just that everybody deserves a voice regardless of gentility or (more importantly) lack thereof. Then, when you find there's a whole party or ideological faction that is literally evil, it calls the whole thing into question--apparently there's somebody who really doesn't deserve to be heard after all? it's an awful conundrum, and you want to not discuss it at all.
The resolution being, I guess, to recognize that the cruel faction IS the gentlemen, the self-regarding aristocracy and the people they can persuade to identify with them, and replace the moral issue (they shouldn't win elections because they're evil) with a political issue (they shouldn't win elections because they oppose majority rule, i.e. democracy itself).
Instead we keep letting them frame themselves as an actual majority (in fact a majority if you left out all the nonwhite voters, though they usually don't say that aloud) victimized by a "meritocracy" of overeducated civil servants and mobs of people of color. That's just a pantomime of democracy. The point of the cruelty is to make sure everybody knows they really have all the power.
Hey! I just found an edit button! Is that a Xmas present from substack or did I just not notice it before? Anyhow good Yule to all!
The conservative project, post-Goldwater (and probably him too, but he couldn’t do it convincingly) was to completely lie about their goals and their intent. Their use of language to stir resentment and to cloud their real agenda can’t be overlooked. Nixon, Reagan, GW, Gingrich, DeLay, McConnell, Cruz Trump, are all, first and foremost, dishonest. Reagan lied the best. Nixon, oddly, seemed the most uncomfortable doing it (although he seemed uncomfortable doing everything), the GW administration lied so much even The New Republic caught on. Noonan’s lying here much as she has done for her entire career. Trump, of course, is the ne plus ultra of dishonesty. He does it so often and with every utterance that it’s removed the need for all these other assholes to bother hiding their true intentions — the last hold out might be the Supreme Court, and the last one in America who doesn’t know this is Breyer who zooms with these fascists everyday.
They’ve been so dishonest and scheming for so long, there is nothing real left of their ideology outside of its cruelty, stripped bare. They’ve even turned against the market as their magical talisman, it being too woke and lenient. Nothing good will come of the next political era, of course, and the relative merits of the liberal consensus one only sparkle in comparison to the depressing mash we are in.
But what I think will happen, and could happen rather quickly — something Sinclair Lewis certainly saw inherent in the movement and what he ended It Can’t Happen Here with — is how unhinged and unstable these vipers will be toward each other the second Trump doesn’t fully command the shock troops.
They want us dead or in pain, as subjects to mock and lord over, but when everyone in a lawless, power-hungry, fascist country wants what every other power hungry fascist wants? When there are no rules, no organizing principles, no charismatic flunky to “lead”?
There will be blood.