74 Comments

First rate, Roy. And "Dame Noonington" alone is worth the price of admission.

Happy holiday, all.

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That's a Wonkettism I believe

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Christmas came early, with the always-welcome gift of a first-rate Noonan take-down.

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Since when would Ms. Noonan know anything about hard work?

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oh hell yeah! 'more freedom, more enjoyment of life, less scrambling in a rat race...' it's great, but THOSE people would only abuse it. best left to pulitzer-winning, podophiles.

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As the Master of the Senate, Joe Manchin, has told us, they just spend their money on drugs, and use their free time to go on hunting trips(?), so better to let the prisons and work houses continue their useful service.

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Funny how THAT isn't something he'll need to explain to the good people of West Virginia.

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"Laborious logic" "Convoluted phrases" don't just make themselves you know...

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Hey, those cocktails don't drink themselves.

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and getting up in the afternoon when you are going from drunk to hung over is hard work

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Between you, me, and the designated divinity figure of your choice

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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.

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I think she got confused* – the proper term of art is "grift thru and thru, and suffer not".

*I know, how could we tell?

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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!

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"Ur-fascism" starring Sean Connery & a very young Christian Slater might well have done it

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I know I'm a fool, but I draw a tiny bit of hope from "gerrymandered districts shall remain as unchanged as possible." Why unchanged? Did they really think they couldn't milk a few more more Republican districts out of the dairy state? Has the tide of demographic change and increasing urbanization finally reached a level where still-greater district-rigging would be unsupportable? Are we witnessing Peak Republican?

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Peak Republican will be achieved anytime there first is a Republican governor after 2022. The previous eight years of Republican control destroyed public unions, wrecked k-12 public schools (I know because I watched my kids' education collapse), invited Foxconn into the public henhouse, allowed prions to run rampant through the white tail deer population (ah, the Texas deer czar, where is he now?), dismantled the triumvirate of employer/union/government that had supported the best workers' comp in the nation, handed the state's economic development department to a bunch of grifting incompetents, nearly destroyed a north woods watershed with toxic metal mining (the primary supporter of that effort, Tom Tiffany, is now a Representative from one of those never-to-be-altered gerrymandered districts.... Geez, I could go on but what the hell, it's obvious it will be worse next time. Book banning, election rigging, teacher intimidation, university defunding, racial profiling, vigilant-enforced abortion bans, the entire racistfascist playbook will be on display. But creating physically small Democratic majority districts in the south that have the same population as rural Republican majority districts in the cut-over lands up north, that's too difficult for the geniuses who rule the state.

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For sure, keeping Evers in the Governors office and expelling RoJo from the Senate has GOT to happen, and I'll be spending the next year working towards those goals. Didn't mean to suggest things can't get much worse, because Scott Walker gave us just a taste of how much worse they can get.

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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.

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Bravo. I've been boring anyone who'd listen with this stuff for decades. Reagan's Republicans, with the collusion of Tip O'Neill Democrats, almost completely shifted the cost of government, e.g., the insane defense budget (a source of much wealth for the very people who no longer had to pay for any of it), from corporations and the wealthy to working people. Payroll tax increases were not only inflated but accelerated to ensure that the working and middle-classes would never NOT pay them. It all amounted to the largest tax -increase- in history. Etc. Etc. It always amazes me how even union guys who were amply screwed by decades of this still elevate Reagan to sainthood.

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RE: user fees, I've used that story on every conservative I run into to describe how "starving the beast" doesn't really work. Government *must* have revenue to provide services, so if taxes don't provide it, user fees will.

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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.

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That Perry Bacon column was marvelous. And I especially appreciated his honesty in giving us this inside view:

"Before I became a columnist, I personally felt real tension around this issue: How could I speak honestly about how I see the Republican Party and still advance my career as a nonpartisan reporter? This is something a lot of journalists, particularly those of color, have felt the past several years as institutionalists — disproportionately White — in the media have often suggested that the press is divided between left-wing partisans and neutral observers."

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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.

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Hi -Noonan is good!

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<curtsies> Merry fucking Xmas to all

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"It's Hi-Noonan somewhere."

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Maybe you didn't mean it this way, but I read "Hi-Noonan" as "I'll just take this cocktail shaker and get on that buckboard out of town before Frank Miller and his brothers show up."

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Cannot disagree with any of the above, but c'mon, Peg and the Finger-Wagging Irrelevants HAS to be #2 with a bullet this week!

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"He is not a good man," etc. = perfect Noonan. The bedtime-story tone, infantilizing the reader in the service of her trademark fairy tales. The complete abdication of responsibility (he "became" president, somehow. Not that Republicans, or their propagandists, had anything to do with it).

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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.

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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.

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Would "sensibly tough it out in times of adversity" require me to wear a MASK?

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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.

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And it's fact that SHE's worrying that a lot of people aren't worrying...

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Well the one real issue I have with this is how do you figure Obama as Liberal?

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The guy saw tens of millions of people who had no health insurance and said "We should do something about this." Now, what he did was a pro-corporate clusterfuck pasted on top of some actual good (the expansion of Medicaid). But it's the mere thought "We should do something about this" rather than "Fuck these people, they brought it on themselves somehow, let 'em die waiting to get into an emergency room" that makes him a liberal.

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Couldn't have put it better myself!

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Lawguy just now

I really don't think so, since what it appears to me he did was say let's put huge amounts of money into the pockets of large corporations and justify it by kind of sort of helping people. But if that is your definition of liberal well then.....................

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Personally, I don't think that "liberal" is an honorific that requires much to earn. Most of the time when I use the term I don't mean it as a compliment. But I think it's a useful term for Democrats who fall somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin, and Obama was that.

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Neoliberal, then?

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Yeah, probably.

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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.

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"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.

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Until Trump, the cruelty was sotto voce, in a soft (public) voice. Going along with it as if it were a principled opposition to moral weakness was a Gentlemen's Agreement in exchange for keeping the empire train on the tracks. Speaking out against it now carries some personal and professional risk for politicians, but much like with Never-Trumpers there are some number of Democrats who believe we can go back to the old agreement if we all just agree to get along, and all the hate and fear will go back to being sotto voce. But how you gonna keep em down on the farm, after they've see Triumph Of The Will?

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But the Democrats have changed too (much for the better, IMO). When the Dems are offering everything from low-cost insulin to student loan forgiveness, there's just more for a Conservative to oppose, and more of a need for them to put their "fuck the poor" attitudes out on public display. When all the Dems were offering was Welfare Reform and more cops, not as much need for Conservatives to show their cruelty.

Personally, I think the Dems should be all about giving LOTS of stuff to LOTS of people, and then let the opposition squirm around explaining why they're against it. Seems like it could work (and is working right now) wonder why they never tried it before?

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The Gentlemen's Agreement (if you're not familiar, it was a best-selling novel made into a movie about anti-semitism). I think the 1-2 punch of Trump and Covid-19 knocked some sense into a big chunk of the Democratic Party. A second real-world experiment that massive public spending wouldn't cause a Great Depression but instead boost the economy overall helped overcome Conventional Wisdom. We're headed into the classic thought experiment of what happens when an irresistable force (reality) meets an immovable object (the Republican Party).

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Agree, I'd only add that a big share of the credit goes to Bernie, who was leading a revolution within the Dem party back when Trump was still considered a joke candidate. Events can push the Democrats in a particular direction, but somebody still needs to do the work of organizing and people need to be ready for it.

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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!

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I just made three edits to my comment! It's a Festivus Miracle!

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And here I was, just about to air the grievance of "no edit button" lmao

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I don’t see one :(

And now I do.

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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.

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When Nixon ain't happy, ain't NOBODY happy!

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