Month: December 2019

Trump finally got to the military

Instagram screenshot

Judging by his Twitter feed and a few appearances before the cameras, President Trump doesn’t seem to be enjoying his holiday break down at Mar-a-Lago. In fact, his tweeting is so obsessive and downright strange it even has some of his staunchest allies telling him he should put the phone down for a while. It’s obvious that the standoff between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is driving him to distraction. If that was part of Pelosi’s plan, it’s working.

Nonetheless, as I noted last week, this hasn’t stopped the merriment at Trump’s commercial resort property. Despite his assertion during the annual Christmas Day phone call to the troops that he works constantly when he’s at “the winter White House,” he’s been playing golf, hosting parties and hobnobbing with pals and paying guests.Among those honored guests was Eddie Gallagher, the former Navy SEAL who was accused of war crimes. The Daily Mail reported on the festivities in detail, including pictures of Gallagher and his wife with the president and first lady as well as Donald Trump Jr. Mrs. Gallagher reportedly gushed, “God bless the Trump family and all they are doing for this country!”

As you probably know, Gallagher was acquitted of murdering an injured ISIS fighter in a controversial military trial. After hearing about the case from Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth and former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik — a convicted felon and buddy of Rudy Giuliani — Trump took the nearly unprecedented step of interfering in the military justice system and ordering Gallagher released from pre-trial confinement. Despite Gallagher’s conviction on a lesser charge, Trump countermanded Navy commanders and restored him to his previous rank, allowing him to keep his SEAL pin, which resulted in the dismissal of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.

Trump has also pardoned two other members of the military accused or convicted of war crimes, even bringing them up on stage with him at a recent fundraiser. He has reportedly told allies he wants those men to campaign with him next year. We will almost certainly see them at the Republican convention. They are MAGA heroes.

Although Trump campaigned in 2016 by endorsing torture, atrocities and mass executions, even going so far as to proclaim that it was important to “take out the families,” it’s still shocking that he’s openly embracing accused war criminals, calling Gallagher “one of the ultimate fighters” and a “very tough guy.”

After the New York Times’ explosive story on Gallagher last Friday, in which we saw the original testimony of his fellow SEALs and footage of the moments before the killing of the sedated ISIS fighter, it’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around the idea that this man was feted at the “winter White House” just last week.

As the Times reported, this was “the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7,”

whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment. “The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.

The culture of the special forces requires a deep sense of loyalty and code of silence. It’s clear that the decision to come forward was very difficult, but what they had witnessed had obviously caused them great anguish. Gallagher says these SEALs accused him of all these crimes because they are cowards who were failing in their duties, and he has instructed his lawyer to sue the New York Times reporter who wrote the story. (You can see why he and Trump have formed such a bond.)

These anecdotes are overwhelming and disturbing. Seeing the text messages and the video of the witnesses makes it even more disturbing that Gallagher is still walking the streets, particularly since there is no dispute that he stabbed the sedated teenager:

Gallagher initially tended to the boy. Then according to seven members of the platoon, he stabbed him. One of them, Craig Miller, said he saw blood gush from the boy’s jugular, a stream of liquid like the kind that one sees when a baby is “throwing up.” Gallagher later texted his friends a photo of the dead boy: “Good story behind this,” he wrote. “Got him with my hunting knife.”

He was acquitted when one of the accusers, a medic who had been given immunity, explained that he was the one who had actually killed the stabbed teenager by cutting off his air-supply to end his suffering.

Nobody knows exactly what happened, but what with all the high-profile presidential interference and an apparently mishandled prosecution, Gallagher got off the hook. Perhaps that was the correct outcome. The state — in this case, the military — has to prove the case it brings and apparently failed to bring the right one.

But it’s impossible to see those videos and read those texts and come away believing that justice was done. Perhaps even more importantly, you can’t read that story and believe society is safe with Eddie Gallagher walking free, much less being treated as a hero by the most powerful man on earth.

The military itself has suffered a great wound as well. It would have been bad enough for Gallagher to be acquitted due to poor lawyering. But that’s how the system works, and sometimes guilty people get away with murder. But Trump’s interference has disrupted a delicate constitutional balance, in which the nonpartisan military is commanded by the civilian president and regulated by the U.S. Congress. As law professor Deborah Pearlstein wrote in the Atlantic:

Watching the president of the United States reward the violation of the most fundamental laws of war, inflaming America’s enemies and alienating America’s allies, was bad enough. But the president’s action appeared to be an intervention in otherwise semi-independent legal and disciplinary processes inside the military — an intervention for the purpose of currying favor with his political base. The pardons — driven by Fox News and reinforced by political rallies — added to the appearance, and reality, that the president regards the military as a tool of partisan politics, not as an institution whose unique constitutional position he has a duty to protect.

The military was the last government institution his ignorance and solipsism hadn’t managed to compromise. But he has finally gotten to that as well.

Forest for the trees
by Tom Sullivan

Escapologist Andrew Basso. Still image via YouTube.

Misdirection is perhaps the magician’s most powerful tool. With it, they make us believe one set of events is taking place when the truth is something else entirely. Magicians manipulate human attention to mystify and entertain. Propagandists manipulate it to misinform, confuse and divide. Politicians use misdirection to avoid accountability for acts they’d rather not see the light of day. Bright, shiny objects, even metaphorical ones, sometimes have a way of drawing our attention all by themselves.

The nation’s capitol, for example. While many of us focused on what happened inside the Beltway, others were winning seats in state houses, redrawing state and congressional districts, and neutering democracy.

After 40 years of foreign policy and economic failures capped by the collapse of 2008, the Great Recession, and “inequality at century-high levels,” one might think Republicans — and Democrats — would question neoliberalism’s laissez-faire approach to politics, global trade, and social philosophy, writes Ganesh Sitaraman (“The Great Democracy”). Especially on the right, the response went beyond “ostrichlike blindness” to doubling down on failure.

But look! See! A record-high stock market. Shiny!

Neoliberalism’s radical individualism fostered a fracturing of the social contract and a balkanization of the political community. Demagogues rushed into the vacuum “to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society.” Not to mention undermining “the preconditions for a free and democratic society.”

Missing the forest for the trees, instead of contemplating rejection of failed premises and looking for new solutions, Washington sought instead technocratic tweaks to the prevailing status quo, Sitaraman writes at The New Republic:

The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to confront the collapse of the middle class and the spread of widespread economic insecurity. The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to address the corruption of politics and the influence of moneyed interests in every aspect of civic life—from news media to education to politics and regulation. The solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to restitch the fraying social fabric, in which people are increasingly tribal, divided, and disconnected from civic community. And the solutions of the neoliberal era offer no serious ideas for how to confront the fusion of oligarchic capitalism and nationalist authoritarianism that has now captured major governments around the world—and that seeks to invade and undermine democracy from within.

That does not mean no minds ever change, Charles Blow explains for the New York Times. The decade has brought more change outside the Beltway. Being gay went mainstream. Support for marijuana legalization became so mainstream even former speaker of the House, John Boehner, became a spokesperson. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, the Women’s March, March For Our Lives, climate activism, etc. reawakened civic activism.

Blow adds:

Mass shootings have become part of the American motif. Republicans and the gun lobby have resisted efforts to address the epidemic of gun violence in this country, so the carnage has become an ambient terror in our society. The mass shootings have not only increased in frequency, they have become more deadly.

In September, The Los Angeles Times analyzed more than 50 years of mass shootings and found:

“Twenty percent of the 164 cases in our database occurred in the last five years. More than half of the shootings have occurred since 2000 and 33 percent since 2010. The deadliest years yet were 2017 and 2018, and this year is shaping up to rival them, with at least 60 killed in mass shootings, 38 of them in the last five weeks.”

But are these shootings dismissed as terrorist attacks or the work of individual madmen trees in a larger forest? Shiny distractions from what’s really going on?

Are the dominant governing structures of the last 40 years, those faulty ideas that exacerbated social disintegration, global instability, the undermining of democracy, and record economic inequality causing (or at least contributing to) the social unraveling? Are technocratic tweaks insufficient to meet the historic moment?

Sitaraman concludes:

In 1982, as the neoliberal curtain was rising, Colorado Governor Richard Lamm remarked that “the cutting edge of the Democratic Party is to recognize that the world of the 1930s has changed and that a new set of public policy responses is appropriate.” Today, people around the world have recognized that the world of the 1980s has changed and that it is time for a new approach to politics. The central question of our time is what comes next.

But like the old light-bulb joke, first the political class has to want to change. Or is making them change our job?

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — digby

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GOP Senators are feeling uncomfortable

Teensy bits of criticism for Trump from GOP Senators isn’t going to make up for their servile boolicking, I’m afraid. But it is a sign that they are feeling a bit uncomfortable about it:

Ivanka weirdly defends family separations

From her Instagram account

Crooks and Liars caught a Ivanka on CBS this morning defending the administration’s horrible border policy:

In a highly publicized interview that aired on Sunday, CBS host Margaret Brennan asked Trump about the family separations policy in light of her concern for all children.

“We went and looked and Homeland Security says there’s still around 900 children who remain separated from their families,” Brennan told Trump. “Is that something that you continue to remain engaged on?”

“Well, immigration is not in part of my portfolio,” Trump replied. “Obviously, I think everyone should be engaged and the full force of the U.S. government is committed to this effort of border security, to protecting the most vulnerable.”

“That includes those being trafficked,” she continued, ignoring the thrust of Brennan’s question. “Which this president is committed to countering and combatting human trafficking in an incredibly comprehensive and aggressive way. So the full United States government has been focused on this issue starting with the president.”

“Ivanka Trump, thank you very much,” Brennan said.

That’s such a stretch and Brennan should have challenged her. They love to trot out the trafficking line but everyone knows that the kids were separated from their own parents and relatives in 99% of the cases. I guess she doesn’t have much choice — there’s really no excuse for this deprave policy —  but it’s telling that the person who’s supposed to be the big advocate for women and children is perfectly fine adopting such a cynical, dishonest line.

I can hardly wait to see the cage match between her and Junior over who gets to be president next.

Yes, they’re actually talking about that.

Jared’s in the mix too.

God help us.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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I’m ok with Bloomberg spending a fortune attacking Trump

This ad doesn’t really sell Bloomberg. It is almost 100% a generic anti-Trump ad:

I’m not sure why Bloomberg is running and I don’t trust his motives. But I’m kind of glad he’s spending some of his huge fortune on this:

Mr. Bloomberg is also already spending more than the Trump campaign each week to reach voters online…. In swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that are likely to decide whether Mr. Trump gets re-elected, ads from the president’s campaign and friendly outside groups have been, for the most part, the only paid messages that voters have seen about him. Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign is focusing its efforts there, hoping to erode Mr. Trump’s standing.

“I’ve been telling anyone who will listen, Trump is winning,” said Kevin Sheekey, the campaign manager for Mr. Bloomberg, who argued that the lack of anti-Trump advertising essentially means “he is running unopposed in swing states.”

He’s right. There should be super-pacs running those ads as well. If we have to have this big money in campaigns, the “good” billionaires need to step up and fill the gap to attack Trump while the Democrats choose their candidate.

The Democrats won in 2018 without openly emphasizing Trump but now that he’s on the ballot, if they ignore him they’ll seem as out of touch as the average Fox viewer who truly believes that Trump is the most successful leader the world has ever known. I know they want to talk about their positive agenda but there simply has to be a tough anti-Trump message out there alongside it.

The article cites a Facebook ad that says “Say no to chaos” and another with the message  “Another tweet. Another lie. Trump has tweeted thousands of false statements — causing chaos and embarrassing our country,” with a picture of a soybean farmer with his face in his hands. That seems like a smart way to do it. They’ve also tested populist messages that seem to play well with voters which point out how Trump hasn’t delivered on his promises to average workers but gave corporations a huge boost.

I don’t know that Bloomberg is the guy to deliver those messages but somebody has to. And they will redound to the benefit of any of the Democrats if they take hold.

If Trump knows one thing it’s that relentlessly pounding home a message can cut through the cacophony.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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This bloated war machine is beside the point

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — digby

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Good news week revisited
by Tom Sullivan

This post began as a change of pace to run counter some of the bad news this year.

Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times declares 2019 the best year ever. Around the world, more people got electricity and piped water. Fewer children died by age 15. Fewer people went hungry. Literacy rates set records around the world, etc.

The Washington Post Editorial Board lists “19 good things that happened in 2019.” There is a new therapy for cystic fibrosis and a new vaccine against Ebola. A record number of women took seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in January. Drug overdoses dropped by 5.1 percent from 2017 to 2018 — only 68,577 died in 2018. Etc.

Then news broke last night about a mass stabbing during a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, N.Y. northwest of New York City in Rockland County. Fifty to 60 people were there and had just lit the menorah:

A witness described the scene as terrifying.

“I saw him walking in by the door. I asked who was coming in in the middle of the night with an umbrella. While I was saying that, he pulled it out from the thing and he started to run into the big room, which was on the left side. And I had thrown tables and chairs, that he should get out of here. And the injured guy, he was bleeding here, bleeding in his hand, all over,” said Aron Kohn. “I ran into the other room to save my life. I saw him running this way, so I ran the other way to save my life. He said something but I could not understand what he said. I saw him pull out the knife from the holder, the case.”

All of the victims were taken to the hospital in critical condition. officials said.

Ramapo Police Chief Brad Weidel said hours later that New York City police had located a vehicle and possible suspect being sought in connection with the stabbing in Harlem.

One victim was reported stabbed at least six times. A more recent report lists two of the victims in critical condition. Police have not yet determined a motive.

The attack comes after NYPD police increased patrols in Jewish neighborhoods in response to a spate of anti-Semitic violence:

“The community is terrified,” said Evan Bernstein, the New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, who was at the crime scene in Monsey on Saturday night. “They are very, very scared.”

The Times and the Post get points for effort, but that level of tension is hard to massage out with a couple of good news stories.

The Guardian reports that 2019 saw the largest number of mass killings on record in the U.S. (since 2006). And the good news? The overall U.S. homicide rate went down. The 211 dead in mass killings this year has not surpassed the 224 killed in 2017, nor has any single mass murder event this year topped the 2017 slaughter of 58 at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas. There are still three days left in 2019.

The Miami Herald notes that the 2010s were a decade of mass killings for Florida, leaving 74 dead, 49 just at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016. Seventeen more died in the Valentine’s Day mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

And a massive suicide bombing Saturday in Somalia, not to put too fine a point on it.

My last “good news week” post in in March 2016 addressed rising sea levels. This morning, the Netherlands wonders when much of it will disappear under the sea.

I’m hanging onto anecdotal reporting by Jared Yates Sexton that some Obama-Trump voters are experiencing an epiphany a week or so earlier than Catholics.

The Trump supporters I’m talking to have all supported him without question. But for all his bragging about the market, they’re not seeing any differences. They’re tired of his whole act and admit, when they feel safe, that they know he committed crimes with the Ukraine call.— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) December 28, 2019

It’s not much good news, but take it where you can get it.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — digby

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Saturday Night at the Movies

If you really must pry: Top 10 films of 2019

By Dennis Hartley

As the year closes, it’s time to share my picks for the top 10 first-run films out of those that I reviewed in 2019. Per usual I present them alphabetically, not in ranking order.

David Crosby: Remember My Name – David Crosby marvels aloud in A.J. Eaton’s film that he’s still above ground …as do we. Cameron Crowe produced this doc, edited from several days of candid interviews he conducted with the 77-year-old music legend. Crosby relays all: the sights, the sounds, the smells of six decades of rock ‘n’ roll excess. I was left contemplating this bittersweet line from Almost Famous: “You’ll meet them all again on the long journey to the middle.”

Dolemite is My Name – This film was a labor of love for producer/star Eddie Murphy, who has been pitching a biopic about the late cult comedian and film maker Rudy Ray Moore to studios for decades. Repeatedly thwarted by reticence of studio execs to green light a project about a relatively obscure entertainer, Murphy persisted until Netflix gave a nod. This adds nice symmetry to the film; as it mirrors Moore’s own perseverance. Directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan) and co-written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (the duo who co-scripted Tim Burton’s Ed Wood biopic) the film depicts how Moore (Murphy), a struggling middle-aged musician and standup eking out a living working at a Hollywood record store and moonlighting as a nightclub MC, found the “hook” that brought him notoriety. While it doesn’t tell the complete story, Dolemite Is My Name captures the essence of what he was about; mostly thanks to Murphy’s committed performance, which is the best work he has done in years.

(Full review)

Driveways – There is beauty in simplicity. Korean American director Andrew Ahn and writers Hannah Bo and Paul Thureen fashion a beautiful, elegantly constructed drama from a simple setup. A single Korean American mom (Hong Chau) and her 8-year old son (Lucas Jaye) move into her deceased sister’s house. She discovers her estranged sis was a classic hoarder and it appears they will be there longer than she anticipated. In the interim, her shy son strikes up a friendship with a neighbor (Brian Dennehy), a kindly widower and Korean War vet. I know…it sounds like “a show about nothing”, but it’s about everything-from racism to ageism and beyond. Humanistic and insightful. Wonderful performances by all, but the perennially underrated Dennehy is a standout.

The Edge of Democracy– Latin American countries have a long history as ever-simmering cauldrons of violent coups, brutal dictatorships, revolving door regimes and social unrest. In The Edge of Democracy, Brazilian actress and filmmaker Petra Costa suggests there is something even more insidious at play in her country these days than a cyclical left-to-right shift. Costa’s film delves into the circumstances that led to the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff, and the imprisonment of her predecessor, the wildly popular progressive reformer Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. The real coup for Costa (no pun intended) is the amazing accessibility she was given to President Rousseff and ex-President Lula during these events. This is the most powerful documentary about South American politics since Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile. It is also a cautionary tale; “we” have more in common with Brazil than you might think.

The military doesn’t just answer to Trump

Military Times: 

Half of active-duty military personnel contacted in the poll held an unfavorable view of President Trump, showing a continued decline in his approval rating since he was elected in 2016. 

Trump’s 42 percent approval in the latest poll, conducted from Oct. 23 to Dec. 2, sets his lowest mark in the survey since being elected president. Some 50 percent of troops said they had an unfavorable view of him. By comparison, just a few weeks after his electoral victory in November 2016, 46 percent of troops surveyed had a positive view of the businessman-turned-politician, and 37 percent had a negative opinion.

Law professor Deborah Pearlstein made an important observation  about the relationship between the military and the other branches ofgovernment in this article in the Atlantic

In his efforts to mask the seriousness of his actions around Russia and Ukraine, President Donald Trump has taken aim at one essential democratic institution after another—questioning the legitimacy of the press, the intelligence community, the courts, and, most recently, the House of Representatives itself. But he has so far mostly held his fire against both “his generals” and “our boys” in America’s military. “I will always stick up for our great fighters,” Trump promised his political supporters in Florida at a recent rally, championing on that day his recent decisions to pardon soldiers accused of war crimes.

The military, for its part, has had more mixed feelings. As a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, described one such pardon, the president’s action was nothing less than an “abdication of moral responsibility.” Indeed, the military’s generally steadying reactions to the president’s worst moments of volatility have given members of Congress on both sides of the aisle reason to hope that the Pentagon at least will remain a check on presidential impulse that might really compromise national security, should other checking institutions fail. But hoping that a president will defer to the judgment of the professional military is a sign that something has gone very wrong in America’s constitutional infrastructure. The American republic was, after all, founded on the complaint that the king had “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” 

She goes on to describe the debate that took place at the founding in which they contemplated the unique relationship between a civilian commander-in-chief and what was not, at the time, a standing military.They worried about the military becoming enmeshed in politics or following a charismatic leader over the will of the people. In the end they followed George Washington’s advice that there needed to be a disciplined, regulated force subject to the rule of law and they decided “the president would command the armed forces; Congress would regulate them:

And regulate the military Congress has, with many of the Framers’ concerns in mind…In large part, these measures have worked. Congressional regulation has prevented the realization of the Framers’ worst fears—either a military that chronically runs roughshod over the preferences of elected civilian authorities, or a civilian leader able to exploit military might outside the rule of law for his own partisan ends. 

This is part of what made President Trump’s recent pardons of Mathew Golsteyn, Edward Gallagher, and others like them, so troubling. Watching the president of the United States reward the violation of the most fundamental laws of war, inflaming America’s enemies and alienating America’s allies, was bad enough. But the president’s action appeared to be an intervention in otherwise semi-independent legal and disciplinary processes inside the military—an intervention for the purpose of currying favor with his political base. 

She points out that the congress has the power to intervene on behalf of the rule of law. And hey can hold hearings and conduct oversight on foreign and national security policy in general. They have certainly done so in the past.

But she also cautions against getting the military enmeshed in partisan disagreements which is a noble goal but very difficult at a time when one party is so blinded by devotion to the president that any kind of oversight is seen as a partisan attack.  I’m not sure what we can do about that.

But it is true that the congress has this power and if the Democrats win in 2020 they must take a long look at military policy and see if there is a way to insulate military justice from a president who openly admires and protects war criminals and works to destroy military discipline with his twitter feed. We have never confronted this issue before but now we know.

We are still running the Happy Hollandaise end-of-year fundraiser. If you would like to support this kind of independent media as we cover what is going to one doozy of a political year, you can do so below.


And thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am truly grateful. — d

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An originator of Trumpism has died

Don Imus was on MSNBC in the morning for 10 years

Don Imus has died. He loved his family and did some good philanthropic work.

But as we deal with the crazy person in the White House and wonder how in the hell such a cretin could possibly have become president, I think this piece  I wrote might shed some light:

Monday, April 09, 2007

by digby

I’ve been listening to alleged journalists falling all over themselves on television to assure all of us that Don Imus is a really great guy underneath all the ugliness and that he’s really, really, really sorry. David Gregory is vouching for him like a brother while that paragon of integrity Armstrong Williams is begging that he be given another chance.

I can’t help but be reminded of the Imus profile of a year ago in Vanity Fair (not online, unfortunately) in which his psychotic freakshow was fully revealed. I’m sure all these disgusting sycophants read it. After all, it featured them in starring roles — being insulted by Don Imus:

“They don’t make good decisions,” he says of MSNBC and its programming. “You can’t make idiotic decisions like (hiring hosts) Tucker Carlson and Ron Reagan.” Of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, he says: “He’s a twit. He’s a pussy.” 

This is in the same spirit as an earlier comment on Senate majority leader Bill Frist (“a fucking criminal”). Similarly, when he looks up from his circular desk at a television monitor during a commercial break and sees Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, silently nattering away, he says, “There’s that idiot,” to no one in particular.

It makes you wonder why they continue to appear on his show and are making complete fools of themselves today assuring everyone that Imus is a “good man.”

This might explain it:

I can feel the high of becoming part of his incestuous circle of regulars-the media elite who have entree with the I-Man and have never seemed troubled, at least publicly troubled as far as I can tell, by the show’s forays over the years into homophobia and crudeness and sexism. I like this idea of being right in there with columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory and Tim Russert (husband of Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth), all Imus regulars. I wonder if there’s some secret media-elite handshake I need to learn, just so I can hear the jubilant sound of the cash register ringing when it comes time to sell my next book, because nobody (with the clear exception of Oprah) sells a book better than Imus. 

He likes that power, enjoys going on Amazon to see just how much he can boost a book. During the week I’m there, he has Larry the Cable Guy on as a guest-Larry has just written a book called Git-r-Done. Before the show, according to Imus, the book was about 1,800 on the Amazon list. But when he checks on the Internet just after the show, it’s No. 122. 

I wonder if the media elite’s failure to seriously take Imus to task for anything is due to a fear that their book-promotion pipeline will be cut off if they rub him the wrong way. In a 1998 New Yorker piece, Ken Auletta drew up a list, confirmed by Imus, of more than a dozen high-profile journalists who made contributions to the Imus Ranch…

It’s as if they believe we can’t read or are too stupid to figure out what they are doing. I read Vanity Fair. I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the “angry left” — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.

They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.

Don Imus has been behaving badly and apologizing for it for many, many years. I expect he will continue to do so once he’s finished with his two week vacation. And all of these writers will once again make pilgrimages to his show and pledge fealty to him in order to sell books. Because, unlike those great basketball players he maligned so casually — they really are whores.

Update: I just watched an MSNBC panel unable to come up with an instance of Rush Limbaugh racism except for his comment that Obama is a halfrican. I guess they forgot that he was fired from ESPN for his bigoted remarks about Donovan McNab:

“the sports media, being liberals just like liberal media is elsewhere, have a desire that black quarterbacks excel and do very well so that their claims that blacks are being denied opportunity can be validated.”

For some reason, the mainstream media just refuse to believe that Rush is a wingnut jerk of the highest order. When he is publicly exposed as a racist to the extent that he is fired from a broadcast network, they forget all about it. Why is that?

(And, of course, there are myriad other example as well. But you’d think that would at least have stuck in their memories.

Oh, and at the time it happened, Rush had to decline to accept the Claremont Institute’s “Statesmanship Award” that year because he was under such a cloud for his drug addiction and racist remarks and had to go to rehab. Not to worry. They gave it to him the next year. Here is a little piece of the speech the racist creep gave at the “Churchill Dinner” where he accepted a bust of old Winnie himself:

How many of you yesterday happened to see any pictures at all of the opening ceremonies of the Bill Clinton Library and Massage Parlor? (Laughter) How many hands do I see? Okay. I don’t see too many hands and I’m not surprised. Let me tell you, I watched it. Not because I wanted to. I watched it for you. 

I watched it, my friends, because it’s my business to do this. The Clinton library opening ceremonies epitomized, if you will, exactly where the left in this country is today. First, where was it? It was in a red state. They hate red states. In fact, the media in this country, the — what I call them, the liberal spin machine — I don’t like to use the word “mainstream press” anymore. 

The liberal spin machine was there. They were all excited. But they’re thinking about sending foreign correspondents to the red states to find out what people — and to the red counties of California — to find out what Americans are really like.

That was 12 years ago.

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