Where are they now?

Andrew Sullivan is currently skulking around behind a Substack paywall griping about all the usual, fearmongering about trans people.  Half his blog is now apparently spent posting pictures of the views from the windows of various people.

Matthew Dowd is making the rounds complaining how unfair it was that he was fired.  A) Yep, and B)  Welcome to the American workforce!

MSNBC pundit ousted over Kirk talk says network agreed comments were misconstrued

Matthew Dowd tells Katie Couric ex-employer concurred but ‘it didn’t matter’ and they dismissed him anyway. 

The political analyst fired by MSNBC over his Charlie Kirk commentary says his former employer agreed with him that his remarks were being misconstrued as “insensitive” – but said “it didn’t matter” to the network, and they dismissed him anyway.

“I said: ‘I think you guys are making a huge mistake,’” Matthew Dowd said on Katie Couric’s podcast. “I said: ‘You know and I know that’s not anything what I meant. You know it’s been misconstrued’ – and they agreed with that.

“They agreed it had been misconstrued. But they said it didn’t matter. The decision’s been made.”

Mr. Dowd is also trying to claw his way back into the circus by explaining why the media is Teh Sux0r, which, if you know Mr. Dowd's history, is the stuff absurdist comedies are made of:

Political pundit and consultant Matthew Dowd said the media’s “herd mentality” is promoting the feeling that President Donald Trump’s tactics of distraction and disruption are working to fool the public into putting Trump in a better light than he deserves.

Despite Steve Schmidt's repeated, heroic efforts to burn his career to the ground, the grifter in him just keeps trying to resurrect himself from the ashes.    This week he scored that coveted 32nd paragraph mention in a New York Times column of which no one made it past the 3rd paragraph.  

 Would it surprise you to learn that Schmidt is lashing out at [checks notes] Both Sides?

"The ad comes from a new group, the Save America Movement, whose leaders say they want to fight Trump with what they call “counter-propaganda.” Two of its leaders — Mary Corcoran, a former public relations executive and Steve Schmidt, a former top aide to John McCain who co-founded (and later left) the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project — are not currently impressed with either party.

They view Trump’s Republican Party with utter contempt, and fault Democrats for failing to push back effectively..."

But didn't he and his pals already save us all back in [checks notes] 2020 (File This Under Selling Your Birthright for a Mess of Pottage)?

That was the setup.  

Here's the punch line.

So far, the group has raised $4 million for their venture, though they hope to use location-targeting technology to spend efficiently...

By now the Alert Reader has noticed that every two bit grifter and refugee from their sinful Republican past has pitched up their own individual revival tents hung with their own, individual "movements" and "causes" banners, each one promising to save Murrican Democracy for the low-low introductory membership price of just $9.95 per month.  

But wait!  There's more!  

If you choose to upgrade to our Platinum Membership level ($250/month or a one-time "Hero of Democracy" donation of $10,000) you will receive early access to their podcasts, access to their Discord and an "I Paid A Shit Ton Of Money To Save Democracy And All I Got Was This Lousy Tee Shirt" tee-shirt.

If I told you that Mark "Helicopter Boy" Halperin had shaved his head, gotten some Iron Cross and Skull tats and had gone undercover with the Proud Boys, for a second would you wonder if maybe it was true?   Because the oleaginous Halperin, who was once a ubiquitous presence on the Sunday shows and cable news, has vanished from sight.  Where is he now?  Lemme throw a couple of headlines at you, then you can guess.

First:

Mark Halperin Tells Megyn Kelly How Charlie Kirk’s Assassination...

And then:

Journalist calls it ‘incredible’ that ABC pulled Kimmel after years of anti-Trump programming

Panelists Mark Halperin (editor and chief of Two Way?) and Byron York (Fox News contributor) join ‘The Ingraham Angle’ to discuss fallout from Charlie Kirk’s assassination and ABC’s decision to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Hilarious that Halps is still demanding to be called a "journalist".  And wuzzit Two Way?  A YouTube thingie which he co-hosts with Sean "Puffy" Spicer and someone from the Shadow Realm called Daniel Calhoon Turrentine  -- a name obviously stolen from the unpublished works of Mark Twain.  

The blurb for morning edition of this drivel... well ... the word "grandiose" hardly covers it (for the full effect, this should be read in your head in the voice of the late Ted Knight doing his Super Friends  voiceover.)

Every weekday morning, the executives who run America’s television news networks chair a key gathering of their anchors, correspondents and producers to look ahead at the day’s forthcoming events. The meeting offers – for those lucky enough to attend – a fascinating, forward-looking snapshot of the news cycle ahead. 

Each weekday morning on 2WAY, the home of conversations like no other, “The Morning Meeting” offers the chance to attend – and participate in – one such meeting...

And since I am a merciful blog host, I shall reprint only the first little bit of the blurb for the evening edition of this drivel:

Join Mark Halperin and some of the leading minds in politics...

But the best headline of all?  From an outfit called "ABD Post":

MARK HALPERIN brilliantly breaks down why Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel...

The "ABD Post" is a pro-Erdoğan Turkish-American website about which you have never heard, and from which you will never hear again.  

And finally, a two-fer.  In case you were worried that you might have to hold a bake-sale to support Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, you can stop worrying.  They are both are residing comfortably in the reactionary libertarian free-speech terrariums their tech oligarch sugar daddies built for them and their ilk.

From The New Republic:

Tech billionaires and iconoclast journalists suddenly see eye to eye.

...

"Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left", a new book by the journalist Eoin Higgins, is an attempt to understand how a collection of unimaginably wealthy, increasingly angry titans of technology and finance were able to acquire loud allies among journalists who had, until relatively recently, been largely associated with the political left. Higgins previously covered this beat in his work for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and for his own newsletter, The Flashpoint. Some of that work is repurposed here, but the book expands on it, taking a broader look at the sociocultural and political currents that have brought new alignments of writers, audiences, and funders.

His two main subjects are the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, although a number of other new-media all-stars and hangers-on make appearances...

And that is the end of the news.

In case you were wondering what the Pod Save lads have been getting up to.  

Going Full Gavin Newsome is all the rage now, because Bros before Foes, kids.

Great.  

Just great.

...in which he dives deeeeep into Free Speech Absolutist Elmo Mush caving to the political demands for censorship by Turkish authoritarian monster Recep Tayyip Erdogan just days before Turkish elections.

From The Daily Beast:

Elon Musk Gets Roasted After Twitter Bends to Turkish Censorship Request

Which I assume will then become a 144-part graduate seminar at Bari Weiss'  Substack University of Advanced Phrenological Studies.  There to be team-taught by Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald and, if I had to guess, their soon-to-be Fascist-in-Residence, Tucker Carlson.

In case you were wondering what the Greatest Journalist in the World, your pal Glenn Greenwald, was up to these days, I'll fill you in.

He can currently be found waaay out on the fringe, at the wingnut dive bar called Rumble, in a "studio" that screams "1994 Mail Boxes Etc. waiting room" sporting a haircut that they refer to as "The Full Gump" at SuperCuts...just blathering endlessly (using adjectives he had already drained of all meaning back in 2009) about the authoritarian, lockstep, jackbooted Democrats led by the nefarious AOC and their struggle to the death with the diverse, noble, tolerant and broad-minded Republican party. 

Having lost all credibility with most of the credulous Liberals who once admired him even as he made absolute dupes of them...and having been drummed out of the media company he created because he could not keep the hysterical/crazy out his writing, to hang onto the spotlight -- any spotlight -- Spleenwald finally glommed into the last and lowest available rung at the (pardon the mixed metaphor) bottom of the cable news barrel: Tucker Carlson's frequent sidekick and useful "Liberal" idiot. 

And now Tucker Carlson -- Lex Luthor to Spleenwald's Otis --

 -- is no more.  

And I will admit that today I took some, unhealthy pleasure in watching him, sitting behind his lil' pretend journalist Rumble desk, giving off the same dumbstruck, "But Who's My Daddy Now?" vibe that Clarence Thomas reeked of after Scalia croaked, while trying to turn his complete ignorance of WTF just happened to his Fox News sugar daddy into some kind of informed speculation...and then trying to weave that mop of gelatinous verbal mess in with his same, tired  authoritarian-lockstep-jackbooted-Democrats-nefarious-AOC tirade that was, itself, clearly on autopilot.

Twas glorious.

And whatever else one can say about the long, smug, dishonest, narcissistic and thoroughly assholish road Spleenwald traveled to reach this hour of his greatest need, one can definitely say that he brought all of it entirely on himself.

Selah. 

Despite some factional infighting, before 2008/2009 it was possible to squint hard enough to believe that the Liberal blogosphere might actually evolve into the actual "Liberal Media" that had always danced like a mirage at the far horizon of possibilities.  

Then things changed in a hurry.

By that time, Both Siderism had so congealed into the official state religion of the Beltway Media that on the Left, vivisecting this creepy ritual of Both Sidesing every Republican atrocity had become a topic in and of itself,

But then Barack Obama was inaugurated, and the soaring rhetoric of the campaign gave way to the brutal meatgrinder of governing.  And right out of the gate, President Obama was caught flat-footed by the unbending obstructionism of Republicans.  These were not his Harvard conservative friends, or the Republican denizens of the Springfield state house with whom one could have a drink, play a little poker and cut a deal or two.

These were unified, ferocious and racist ideologues, acting in lock-step, who made it perfectly clear they would do whatever it took to sabotage and destroy his administration.  This disillusioned millions of Obama supporters who’d never been through this meatgrinder before and had expected everything Democrats had proposed to sail through the House and the Senate on the strength of their virtue and general awesomeness.  And when that didn't happen, it felt like an apocalyptic betrayal and they became easy picking for the new, rising force in the Liberal blogosphere:  the Jane Hamsher/Glenn Greenwald "Obama is Worse Than Bush!!" Left.

From a 2014 Atlantic article by Norm Ornstein:

Why the LBJ of 1964 Wouldn't Succeed in the Washington of Today

Obama isn't stalled out because he can't lead like Johnson, Reagan, or Clinton—it's because the nature of the opposition party has changed.

The meme is what Matthew Yglesias, writing in 2006, referred to as "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics," and has been refined by Greg Sargent and Brendan Nyhan into the Green Lantern Theory of the presidency. In a nutshell, it attributes heroic powers to a president—if only he would use them...

This became a very common refrain among people who I thought damn well knew better. 

In the spring of 2013, future Putin permanent houseguest, Edward Snowden, passed tens of thousands of stolen, secret US intelligence documents along to Glenn Greenwald, thus promoting him from contrarian crank, to the World's Most Famous Contrarian Crank.

A couple of months later, eBay founder Pete Omidyar offered Greenwald a quarter of a billion dollars to start his own media company, which rumor has it was originally going to be called, "Great!  Now we can really skull-fuck Obama and the Dems!" but was changed to The Intercept for legal reasons.

And thus Greenwald was promoted again, this time from the World's Most Famous Contrarian Crank to World's Most Famous Contrarian Crank With a $250M Megaphone.

And woe betide the poor, stupid Liberal blogger who didn't have a quarter billion dollar check from Pete Omidyar in his or her back pocket, but who nonetheless persisted in pointing out that Greenwald was now wildly exaggerating, arguing in blatantly bad faith, and outright lying rather a lot.  That he had divided the entire world into two and only two camps: people who agreed with him completely and uncritically, and Jackbooted O-Bot fascists.  And that it might not be wise to follow hims down the deep, dark hole into which he was headed.

But by now a depressingly large number of my Liberal allies were members of the Greenwald Horde, and had become card carrying members of the Both Sides Do It (and Dems are Worse)/Disrupt The K'rupt Duopoly Club. 

Y'know, just like David Broder.  

And Matthew Dowd.  

And Ron Fournier.   

And Peggy Noonan.  

And David Fucking Brooks.    

And Maureen Dowd.

And Joe Scarborough.

And on and on and on.  

They and the "Fuck Obama and Fuck Hillary Harder" Dirtbag Left were all on the same team now.  And wasn't that just so very special!

Well, wouldn't you know it, in 2016 they all got their wish, when, in bleak November, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.    And for the next four years the Disrupt The K'rupt Duopoly Club were going to have more Disruption with a capital "D" than they would know what to do with gavaged (look it up) down their throats until they burst.

Also of note, just one month after Trump was elected, Greenwald had already moved on to the next phase of  his "Fuck America" project:  being Tucker Carlson's occasional wacky sidekick.  

From MEDIAite in December of 2016:

Journalist Glenn Greenwald appeared with Tucker Carlson on Fox News tonight to criticize Democratic hysteria over Russia. 

And pretty soon after that, my "Jackbooted O-bot fascist!!!" screaming former Liberal allies started getting real quiet. I haven't seen much of them 'round these parts since.

Ah, but that's just half of the story.

The other half of the story was...what the fuck was the mainstream media going to do now?  For the better part of two years, all of their preening and posturing and prognosticating and been predicated on the assumption that Hillary Clinton could not possibly lose and it was therefore perfectly safe and professionally advantageous to relentlessly bash her all out of proportion with anything she had actually done.

Very much like -- bear with me now -- all the mainstream press' pimping and posturing and superpatriot flag-waving and been predicated on the assumption that the Bush administration's Iraq War could not possibly lose in Iraq.  It was gonna be a cake walk, and it was therefore perfectly safe and professionally advantageous to ignore, slander and generally stomp all over protesters who had warned that it was not going to end well.

So now that the impossible had happened and Donald Trump had been elected, the mainstream media desperately needed to throw together some fairy tale in which they were not complicit villains.  Y'know, just like after the Iraq War went tits up. 

In this case, the fairy tale they needed  told was one in which the mainstream media had not blithely ignored, and lied about, and "Both Sides" the fact that the Republican Party had been a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles for decades.  That it had been racing down the road towards a monster like Trump for decades. 

Which meant that the very last people the mainstream media wanted to hear from on this subject were us dirty fucking hippies who had been right about the Right all along.  Y'know, just like after the Iraq War went tits up.  Our existence was a huge inconvenience, and if the Liberal blogosphere had retained the kind of political and cultural clout it had had back in 2006 or 2007, we might have been able to bring enough pressure to bear on the mainstream media the bend the narrative towards the truth.  

But after eight years of the loudest and most well-funded voices on the Left being the "Fuck The Democrats/Obama Was Worse Than Bush" faction, the Liberal blogosphere was a barely shadow of what it had been back in the day.  Besides, those loud and most well-funded voices were busy becoming Fox News' favorite "Liberal" stooges: 

The mainstream media needed to sell a fairy tale in which the Republican base had not been engineered into an ever more volatile shitpile of bigots and imbeciles for decades because that's how Conserative media built audiences and how Republicans won elections.  A fairy tale in which the party base had instead had been noble, sensible, level-headed bunch who had suddenly and without warning gone insane overnight due to some mysterious, magical power wielded by Donald Trump, and  therefore nobody -- including the mainstream media -- could have seen what was coming.  

And down among the grifters and political vagrants who had been run out of the Republican party during the ascendance of Donald Trump, the mainstream media found the perfect characters with which to populate their fairy tale.  

Over on MSNBC -- the only even remotely "Liberal" channel on cable teevee -- they began shedding Liberal programmings and larding their lineups with Republicans.  

Hugh Hewitt became a regular, and would eventually be given his own show.  GOP consultant Steve Schmidt and former RNC chairman Michael Steele both became regulars, as did Mike Murphy, Ben Ginsberg and Nicole Wallace.  

Eventually, Charlie Sykes was signed on as an MSNBC contributor. 

As was Bill Kristol.  

And Mona Charen.  

And Tim Miller.  

And Rick Wilson.

And Tom Nichols.  

And on and on.

A year after the election, in October of 2017, Charlie Sykes wrote a book entitled “How the Right Lost Its Mind” which got wall-to-wall coverage in the media.

Then, on the strength of the millions of dollars in free publicity lavished on a handful of Never Trumpers, Sykes and a few others launched The Bulwark website, which has become a virtual subsidiary of MSNBC. 

A year after that, life-long Republican hit-man and all-around scumbag Rick Wilson “wrote” his book, "Everything Trump Touches Dies".  Which also got wall-to-wall coverage in the mainstream media.

Then, on the strength of the millions of dollars in free publicity lavished on Wilson, he and a few others launched “The Lincoln Project”: a political marketing corporation and money-pit down which credulous Liberals pissed away millions of dollar and which had become a virtual subsidiary of MSNBC until it was repeatedly rocked by financial and sexual harassment scandals.

All of their success was a direct result of the fact that they all told the story the mainstream media wanted to promote: That Trump had come out of nowhere.  That he had somehow hypnotized an otherwise-sensible, level-headed Republican base.  And that all of this had come as a complete surprise to Sykes and Wilson and Steele and Charen and Michael Gerson and Bill Kristol and Joe Scarborough on and on and on.  That not a single one of them had any inkling about the madness that was cooking right below the sensible, level-headed facade of the Republican base.

And while this was going on as various mainstream media assholes who had been in the vanguard of the media's "Disrupt the K'rupt Duopoly" fetish -- 

-- were hurriedly scrubbing their social media archives of any evidence that they had ever said any such thing.

And you know what?  It worked.  

Again.  

They got away with it.  

Again. 

Because when you control the cameras, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Occasionally some mouthy OG Liberal blogger still tries to use their quaint little old-school blog to poke through the whitewash and bring some actual history into the conversation.  But you probably already know how that goes.

What's that scamp up to now?

Tonight - live at 7pm ET on @SystemUpdate_ - we'll spend the full hour talking with @RepMTG. We'll cover a wide range of topics: her opposition to the US role in Ukraine, her denunciations of CIA/FBI, Big Tech, the GOP establishment and much, much more:https://t.co/gZTF0MaQ9x

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 1, 2023

Oh.

Oh my.

So in addition to being Laura Ingram's occasional political Hitachi wand and Tucker Carlson's frequent political FleshLight, ol' Spleenwald now has his own padded cell on Rumble -- "The cloud services business is known for hosting Truth Social, and the video platform is popular among American right and far-right users" -- where he can write on the walls with his digital feces to his heart's content.

Cool!   

Anybody still have any "droneglass" comments they want to drop?  Left over from back in the days when I was using this little blog of mine to warn that Spleenwald was not to be trusted and got myself slagged myself by all my Liberal betters for even suggesting such a thing?

I was never more "famous" in the upper echelons of the Liberal blogosphere than when I was that asshole who dared to doubt Spleenwald's unalloyed heroism and integrity.  

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Also, for the benefit of future historians, here's a screenshot of the above Tweet -- 

-- posted here because, as Spleenwald has already shown us, he has no qualms about scrubbing his inconvenient past from his Twitter archives...shortly after attacking other people for  scrubbing their inconvenient past from their Twitter archives.

I would declare this to be Peak Greenwald, but as he has already amply demonstrated, there is no Peak Greenwald.

You might think skulking on a mountaintop in Brazil, texting with Tucker Carlson and raving on Twitter like the bastard child of Ben Shapiro and Kevin Sorbo would be the worst possible set of credentials for anyone purporting to know what we Democrats secretly believe.  

But of course it's plenty good enough for the millions of meatbags in Carlson's audience who revel in the idea that the "Liberal" Spleenwald is lifting the curtain and letting them in on our most private musings.    

And then there's this...

On July 23rd ALEX’S WAR will World Premiere on the Big Screen with renowned Journalist Glenn Greenwald hosting a LIVE Q&A with Alex Jones and film director Alex Lee Moyer exclusively on Rokfin. Thanks @TheRokfin, @PlayNiceLtd and @ggreenwald !!!https://t.co/nc1NG2tUZF pic.twitter.com/fGPZhJTBog

— ALEX’S WAR (@AlexsWarMovie) July 18, 2022

Portrait of a grifting viper in freefall

Bolshi Freedom Troll Glenn Greenwald never gets tired of diatribing to his ever-shrinking circle of acolytes how Democrats Need To Lose More.  Because then and only then will something something the Great Proletarian Uprising.

Which presumably Mr. Greenwald will be directing.

From his hilltop Brazilian estate.

That was paid for by internet billionaire sugar daddy money.

Here he is today trying to pick a fight Elie Mystal over a month-old Tweet.

And if one woke up and decided to make themselves as irrelevant as possible, this tweet has the perfect formula.

If you publicly pledge your permanent, unconditional loyalty to a Party, then obviously they're going to ignore your grievances. They should:https://t.co/g0S9ZFplze

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 6, 2022

Which, it's pretty clear now, was the plan all along. 

Biden's 'grotesque' exploitation of Texas school shooting ripped https://t.co/VCXF8vWHQR

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 25, 2022

Perhaps for a hollow, venomous monster like Greenwald who loves nothing and no one it is impossible to imagine why violence done to children -- violence that that has been aided and abetted by the American fascist party which he serves so dutifully -- would provoke sadness and fury among normal humans.

This was a typical of posts by me on the subject of Glenn Greenwald back during the before time:

Whenever There Is Some Headline-Grabbing Barbarity...

...somewhere in the world that is in some way related to those who pervert Islam to serve horrific ends, you can always -- and I mean always -- count on two things.

First, America's premier, globe-trotting, indignance-chasing attorney (who, somehow, is still not being held incommunicado in some lightless super-max prison cell) will be johnny-on-the-spot to set up his card table right in the center of it so he can angrily pamphleteer passer's by about the real tragedy.

And, second, virtually no one in either the mainstream media or in the allegedly fearless Liberal blogosphere will dare to whisper a single discouraging word about Mr.Greenwald's relentless, Westboro Baptist Church-level of tragedy-trolling...

Go back to before the Boston Marathon bombing and you will find this is always Mr. Greenwald's MO.  A terse paragraph to perfunctorily acknowledge that, yes, whatever happened was a real shame blah blah blah...

...then up goes his revival tent right on the still-bloody ground, after which comes the shouty 63 paragraph sermon on what the real crime here was. Which -- always and without exception -- will be one of Mr. Greenwald's two pet issues...

Burn The Lifeboats

incoming owner of Twitter has a chuckle about a tweet Greenw*ld posted to harass @MollyJongFast by listing her address for his deranged followers to see. gross stuff. https://t.co/fqhJ1It1bZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 2, 2022

At this point, is anyone even remotely surprised?

 It's called Compact --

-- because apparently the Spelentic Contrarian Gazette didn't test well with focus groups.  

Ever since Bolshi Freedom Troll Glenn Greenwald decided that pretending not to be a right-wing shitbag was too much work, said "Fuck it" and threw his lot in with Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, the number of Glenn's Spleenwald Horde myrmidons who used to swoop through here to call me a drooling, jackbooted, baby-killing Obot fascist for suggesting that Glenn was a big baloney shooter has dropped to nearly zero.

Mind you, no one has swung by to apologize, but once Glenn had gone on tear about the cowardice of someone else deleting their Twitter archives ...

That's because you constantly and systematically delete your tweets like a coward so that you have no accountability for what you say.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 8, 2018

... and then promptly deleted his own Twitter archives because Greenwald is, above all things, a lying  hypocrite of breathtaking proportions ...

I deleted pre-2016 tweets - because of how easy and often old, out-of-context tweets are distorted - & many are suggesting I did it to hide them from Mueller or FBI. The multi-level stupidity is manifest, but US political culture is drowning in deranged conspiratorial sickness. pic.twitter.com/VfQezWLpDI

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 28, 2018

... and then soon after that deleted the Tweet of him telling everyone that he was deleting his Twitter archive because have I mentioned what an absolutely, bold-faced hypocrite ol' Glenn is? --

-- and then, soon after that, went on to become a wacky sidekick on Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour ...

...well, I figured now that Glenn was going out of his way to rub his ass directly in the faces of his own truest believers the point had been made as pointy as it was ever going to be made.

Because my goal was never to persuade Glenn to stop being a bottomless vortex of seething, Democrat-hating bile.  Just as it has never been my goal to convince David Brooks to stop being a lying, Both Siderism hack, or to convince the Lincoln Lads to stop being mercenary grifters, or to convince Andrew Sullivan to give up his beloved phrenology calipers.

Because those characteristics are who those people are and who they will almost certainly go right on being until they shuffle off this mortal coil.  My goal was always much more humble: to use whatever words I have on this tiny platform I have made for myself to convince whoever would listen of the simple truth of Caveat Emptor.

Buyer Beware.

To persuade whoever might read this of the wisdom of looking under the hood, kicking the tires, and other unhelpful car-buying metaphors before pledging your undying loyalty to anyone.  And if you have built yourself a Big Tin God whose clay feet are showing signs of severe crumbling, instead of declaring that all clay-feet cautioners are alarmist crackpots of drooling, jackbooted, etceteras, be willing to take a step or two back and reassess.

That way maybe you can spare yourself the indignity of getting that edgy "Greenwald 4 Evah!" tattoo on your forehead one day, only to wake up the next day to shit like see this ...

... and this ...

... leering back at you from the teevee.

Just a couple of ultra-privileged, lying racist mopes with permanent sinecures on one of the most influential media platforms in the world, wringing their hands and issuing dire warning about what Evil Liberal Cancel Culture may do to yet another privileged, lying racist asshole who got "caught" on tape using the N-word a hundred times or so.

The truth is, now that Greenwald has gleefully outed himself as exactly what I had been saying he was I probably wouldn't have bothered to write this post at all, but for the fact that my wife and I were literally skipping past Fox News last night (as we are wont to do) when we caught Spleenwald's latest dog-and-phony show she urged me to get a couple of pics.  

I did, and left that Vale of Fears just as Carlson was transitioning from Glenn Greenwald's "Joe Biden is History's Greatest Tyrant" segment to Charlie Kirk's "Uppity Negroes Sure Are Uppity" segment.

But it could have been any night of the week, andy week of the year because Fox is all-madness-all-the-time now.

I'm sure there is a lesson to be found in the fact that while even stone-cold Conservative zealots and OG Iraq Pimps like Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg have finally gotten sick enough of Carlson's "Rise Up White People!" lunacy to slouched off to featherbedding gigs at slightly more respectable venues, Greenwald has been only too happy to stick loyally by Carlson's side to provide him with soothing, on-air handjobs whenever Carlson feels the need for such validation.

Here is Spleenwald in 2010 insisting that Democrats should be willing to lose a few elections and cede complete control of the government to the GOP for who-knows-how-long because that'll show 'em!

Well we kinda ran that experiment in 2016 didn't we?  

Remember the endless think-pieces and screeds by prominent media figures about how it didn't matter whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump won because they were both equally terrible?  How the real enemy was the K'Rupt Duopoly?  How voters should never have to sully their Purity Skirts by ever voting for anyone who was not their first choice and perfectly aligned with them in every way?

Of course most of the prominent media persons who spent the 2016 campaign using their huge platforms to pitch the idea that voters should "send a message" by pissing away their franchise on Jill Stein or Evan McMullin or write-in Edmund Burke or just stay home have all, in various ways, conspired with each other and with the media corporations which own them to never mention it again.  Some, like David Brooks, get away with pretending it never happened because they never allow themselves to get caught in an unmediated venue where anyone might bring it up.  Whereas Matthew Dowd solved the problem of his toxic, craven past by nuking his entire Twitter archives and instantly blocking anyone who mentions it as he reinvents himself on camera as a Hero of the Resistance.  

Anyway, we ran that experiment in 2016 and got Trump.  But pining for imaginary third parties where they would be celebrated as heroes and who sweep them to power has always been the go-to masturbatory fantasy of the deluded, the cowardly and the con man. 

And with that in mind, here is Kinzinger today on The Bulwark podcast:

I think the problem is if you ever even talk about anything like a third party, what ends up happening is it gets right to the point of the election day and somebody looks and goes, "Golly I hate so-and-so so much that I'm not going to throw my vote away on a third party so I'm going to vote for the least of two deplorables."  And we are plugged into this matrix that says, "If you don't like Joe Biden then you've gotta like Donald Trump.  If you don't like Donald Trump then you like Joe Biden."  And there's a whole world outside the matrix of awesome possibilities that we have been told never existed.

This was after Kinzinger spent a goodly amount of time bitching that Democrats don't offer sufficiently delicious cookies and backrubs to dedicated wingnuts like Kinzinger who are no longer sufficiently wingnutty to remain in the GOP's good graces:

The Democrats are doing *nothing* to reach out and draw in those that have been disaffected by Republicanism.  I mean yesterday, for goodness sake, I *wanted* to vote for the this debt limit increase, but this ended up being... they ended up, like, pulling out a billion dollars for aid to Israel.  And I'll tell ya, the Progressive caucus doesn't give a crap about spending.  It's an Israel thing, so anyway... 

And this was before Kinzinger spent a few more moments bitching that the Progressive caucus was exactly the same as the Freedom Caucus because Both Sides.

The Progressive caucus is the exactly same thing as the Freedom Caucus.  They're the same thing.

So a couple of things.

First, Israel hasn't been a ragged band of survivors hanging onto a sliver of land thanks to the protection of the U.S. military for a long, long time.  Israel is a very prosperous country whose own defense industry nets them billions of dollars a year, so they're not exactly crying poormouth.  And if they really, really need those missiles immediately, I'm sure they can scrape up the dough for it somewhere.

The defense industry of Israel is a strategically important sector and a large employer, as well as a major supplier of the Israel Defense Forces. Israel is one of the world's major exporters of military equipment, accounting for 10% of the world total in 2007.

Perhaps representative Kinzinger, who is very, very anti-choice, and very anti Socialized Medicine could persuade them to skimp a little on the free and legal abortion services which are covered under their national health care system and which our tax dollars underwrite?

Shhh! Don’t Tell Evangelical Supporters of Israel, but Abortion There Is Legal — and Often It’s Free

Neither religious conservatives nor liberal feminists are completely satisfied with the status quo in the Jewish state, but the current system allows some 40,000 women to have abortions annually.

...For an Israeli woman who wishes to end a pregnancy, the process is not only legal but is usually heavily subsidized or free, covered under Israel’s national health care system.

Second everyone involved in this fan-dance fucking well knows that Israel is going to get every dollar of that money down the road anyway.  From Bloomberg:

The $1 billion for the Israeli military will instead be included in a later bill funding the U.S. Defense Department that’s expected to get bipartisan support in the House and Senate

Republicans are lining up in opposition because of the debt ceiling provision, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can afford to lose no more than three Democrats if all GOP House members vote against the bill.

Rule Committee Chairman James McGovern said the progressive Democrats objected, arguing that there wasn’t an immediate need for the missiles. The Defense Department asked in a classified supplemental request for $1 billion to replace Iron Dome missiles used by Israel after rocket attacks by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in May.

Although some progressives have been critical of U.S. policy toward Israel and Israel’s handling of the Palestinians, New York Representative Jamaal Bowman said the issue was that the provision was added at the last minute without a chance for discussion.

“It’s not about Israel, it’s about, once again, leadership, throwing something on our table last minute and expecting us to decide in five minutes what to do with it, that’s the bigger problem,” Bowman said. 

UPDATE:  Well that didn't take long did it?

Huge bipartisan vote just now in the House for H.R. 5323, the bill to provide $1b for Israel's Iron Dome air defense system. 210 Democrats and 210 Republicans voting yes. Good to see two pro-Israel parties.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) September 23, 2021

Finally, the real story here is the fallout from the lasting legacy of a party built on the politics of Newt Gingrich and the vocabulary of Rush Limbaugh.  A party where casually slagging the Left every single time they open their fucking mouths has been how Republicans punctuate sentences since before Adam Kinzinger's voice changed and he started getting hair in unusual places, and it's now so wired into their political DNA that they cannot function without it -- cannot address any Republican atrocity without greasing it up with some "But the Democrats..." Both Side Do It spin.  

So when you add to that the enormous sense of entitlement these former- and near-former Republicans possess, you end up with someone like Kinzinger:  a man who believes that taking even half-a-step outside of his own, openly racist, fascist party is such an act of unparalleled heroism that my party -- the not racist, not fascist party -- really owes it to them to remake ourselves into an Eric Cantor/Paul Ryan/John Boehner party just to make them feel more comfortable.  

And when we don't to that -- when we point out that we're already a tent so bag that it contains AOC and Joe Manchin -- they get really really pissed.

Rumble, a YouTube rival popular with conservatives, will pay creators who ‘challenge the status quo’

The video site has exploded during the pandemic as a home for anti-vaccine misinformation and conservative complaints about Big Tech censorship

...

The Toronto-based upstart Rumble said Thursday that it has struck deals with former U.S. congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the journalist firebrand Glenn Greenwald and others who had committed to posting their videos first to the site.

Rumble has emerged over the last year as one of the most prominent video sites for right-wing viewers and provocateurs, and it is seeking to bolster its image as a new online home for those who claim they’ve been censored by Big Tech.

...

The company declined to provide financial details but Greenwald said the top creators’ year-long contracts will pay in the “midrange six figures.”

Taibbi’s been breaking out all the wingnut classics from the 1990s. Really behind the times. pic.twitter.com/0Es74IlWLy

— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) June 4, 2021

"[David Brooks] strikes me as the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a Leona Helmsley lookalike a thousand dollars to take a shit on his back." 

-- Matt Taibbi, April 2010

 

"Matt Taibbi strikes me as the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a David Brooks lookalike a thousand dollars to take a shit in front of him while reading Glenn Greenwald Tweets aloud." 

-- driftglass, June, 2021

This is right up there with Charlie Sykes blaming the Liberals for making the GOP racist.

Clearly people like me are to blame for driving Glenn Greenwald into the arms of Tucker Carlson and driving Matt Taibbi mad.

So, y'know, sorry about all that.

Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media?

The leftist scribe has become “a practitioner of manufactured controversy” for outlets like Fox News, say his stunned former colleagues.

Lloyd Grove, Editor At Large

Justin Baragona, Contributing Editor

"DISGUSTING & DANGEROUS,” screamed the banner headline at the bottom of the television screen, just under the blonde-sheathed visage of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “GREENWALD BLASTS INTERCEPT FOR SMEARING INGRAHAM GUESTS.”

Stop.  "blonde-sheathed visage" is just terrible writing.  But continue.

And so during a recent episode of The Ingraham Angle, Glenn Greenwald -- who is so familiar to the top-rated cable channel’s millions of viewers that he requires only a surname -- put on a suit and tie in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives, to continue doing what has occupied his energies for much of the past month.

Stop again.  "[P]ut on a suit and tie in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives" is also terrible writing,  You people desperately need an actual editor. 

Also the next paragraph should not be a paragraph at all.

Since.

It is continuing.

A related thought.  

Just ask Mike Royko's bartender.

Proceed.

That’s deploying every conceivable platform—from Twitter (where he has 1.6 million followers) to YouTube to Substack to an array of popular conservative websites to the very top of the ziggurat, Rupert Murdoch’s corporate cash cow—to denounce former friends and colleagues at The Intercept, the left-leaning digital news and opinion site he co-founded with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2013.

Beck: Are you looking into "The Great Reset”?
Greenwald: Of course.
The Great Reset conspiracy theory is completely false:https://t.co/EYow4PSEpi pic.twitter.com/X8tdWx1A0B

— Matthew Dimitri 🐍🧪 (@themattdimitri) April 23, 2021

Here we find two of the worse dregs of the media, just shootin' the shit.

Remember the days not so long ago when the righteous Spleenwald Horde would swarm down on anyone who suggested that Glenn Greenwald wasn't the purest and most righteous warrior for Freedumb who walked the Earth?

I mention it because today, before I could dive across the room and change the channel, I accidentally caught 11 seconds of Greenwald's former #1-hype-man, David Sirota, on the Thom Hartmann radio program.  

And so it goes.