Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

When you read tonight's meme, you will know why the president who hates everything that lives and breathes did everything he could to create safe passage for a pandemic. Not caring about others lies at the root of what it is to be a Republican. It's who they are and they are remarkably consistent. Trump's gutting of funds for anti-plague programs was just another illustration of his and their psychopathic contempt for others. I can't wait to hear who Trump blames when White House staffers start dropping like flies.

Donnie Head Case even ended international programs started by President Obama. Of course he did. That move alone has now adversely affected the lives of people in 39 countries including... wait for it... China. A case can now be made for calling the coronavirus "The Trump Pandemic" but if you wish to be somewhat generous, I suppose you could limit calling it that to just this country. Still, it's not for lack of effort on the part of our psychopathic prez. The media hacks will continue to say that Trump's response to the outbreak was all about a lack of leadership. They are too naive to admit to themselves and to us the there has been no lack of leadership. The problem is that Trump, in every area of concern to our country has shown plenty of leadership but all in the wrong direction. We are witnessing the mutant fruits of his efforts, from wrecked education infrastructure, replenished carcinogens in our air, food that is even more damaging to us, re-polluted lakes and streams to our troubled respiratory systems. At this point, how can there be any doubt that the psychotic Trump snorts his crushed Adderall every night and stays up late trying to come up with new ways to destroy human lives?

The hypocritical hate-filled anorexia poster child with the plastic face and plastic Devo-hair pictured in tonight's meme died on this day in 2016. She is still worshiped as a goddess by Republicans everywhere.

Maybe the best reason to spread word of Nancy Reagan's first home is that she doesn't seem to like people knowing

Justin's caption: "Though this modest 2-story frame house with yellow siding at 149-14 Roosevelt Avenue, between 149th Street and 149th Place, remains unmarked by a plaque or medallion of any kind, this is the home where former First Lady Nancy Reagan spent the first two years of her life."

by Ken

The other day I promised to return to what sounds like a fairly routine question: Where was Nancy Reagan born? What makes the question rather more interesting is that it seems to be a touchy subject for Mrs. Reagan, and suggests in turn that Mrs. R has a relationship to reality reminiscent of that of her late husband, the sainted Ronnie, whose most enduring legacy to the country seems to me the lesson, now totally absorbed by the Right, that reality is whatever you want it to be -- or, to put it another way, whatever makes you feel best.

Now of course "feeling best" doesn't necessarily mean "feeling contented." For right-wingers, in fact, it often means what seems like the opposite: feeling mad as hell. We just need to remember that one of the things they like best in life is feeling outraged, aggrieved, betrayed, and so on. And of course the people who treat the unwashed rubes like brainless puppets know this better than anyone, and know how much return there is to be gotten from getting the pathetic, otherwsie-useless, doody-kicking legions of right-wing saps hopping mad at the usual targets. Thus the ease of spreading psychotic delusions about, say, Hillary Clinton, or Planned Parenthood, or indeed anyone with a working brain and an ounce of decency or humanity.


IF YOU WERE TO LOOK NANCY REAGAN UP --

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It would be nice if potential Scott Walker supporters at least KNEW that he lies compulsively to promote himself and his diseased ideology

Odds are that when you look up "pathological liar" in the dictionary, Scott Walker will be lying in the picture of him you find there.

by Ken

The other day I mentioned in passing that I'm less concerned than I once was with whether a particular right-winger lies so much because the person really has some kind of fundamental brain dysfunction or because the person is simply a habitual liar. My point was that, practically speaking, does it matter?

Take a simple case of Fox Noisemakers. It's hard to believe that Bill O'Reilly doesn't know he's a master con artist, that most of the stuff that comes out of his mouth when he's on the job is bullshit. By contrast, it could hardly be easier to believe that Sean Hannity doesn't know, that his ability to take in and process information is so defective that he truly doesn't know. In both cases, does it matter? I used to think so. Now I'm more inclined to think that the House of Liars has many rec rooms, and in the end what matters is their mandate to Go Forth and Lie.

Same deal with pols. Some of the far-right-wingers know better and some don't. Take an extreme case like Arkansas state Rep. Justin Harris, whom we were looking at last night, who in the kindliest interpretation took into foster care three young girls whose emotional troubles he wasn't remotely equipped to deal with, and was able to "return" one but then felt obliged to "rehome" the others, one of whom was subsequently raped by the guy she was turned over to, who happened to be an employee of Representative Harris's Christian-values preschool. Now this guy, suddenly in this highly unwelcome media spotlight, has to know that he's telling a lot of lies in an attempt to deflect blame. But in his head he is, I think, so deeply deluded about reality that he has no idea how unfit he is to have any contact with children of any sort in any fashion.

As you can see, I still can't stifle that impulse to categorize the "authenticity" of right-wing lies. And I guess, deep down, it still matters to me. Maybe I can rationalize it by suggesting that maybe it makes a difference in how we might most effectively deal with a particular right-wing fabulist.

Take Wisconsin Gov. Scott "I Lie to Live" Walker. This is a man who has perhaps never in his life told the truth about anything unless he absolutely didn't have a more suitable lie to offer in its place. I don't think there's any question where he lies on the spectrum of habitual untruthfulness from mental defective to pathological liar. If you look up "pathological liar," chances are you'll find a picture of Scott, and he'll probably be in the act of prevaricating.

You can't lie as unceasingly, as flagrantly, and as unflappably as the Lie-Master does without being a plain old compulsive liar. I suppose he could be the victim of some sort of mental impairment, but his case sure has all the hallmarks of plain old cynical opportunism -- he tells lies all the time because he believes that a certain portion of those lies will stick well enough to get him something he wants.

So how hilarious is it to learn that one of his heart-tuggiest public blitherings is -- you guessed it -- a near-total fabrication? Just a coldly calculating scheme to get some PR mileage by manufacturing a photo op with an aging conservative icon (who despite her avanced age continues to do whatever she's asked by the" forum" that bears her and her late husband's name in support of rising right-wing flotsam) and making up a total bullshit story to go with it. Some people might be restrained a tiny bit by pangs of conscience; this is evidently an impediment our Scott doesn't suffer from.

Jud Lousbury tells us in his Twitter bio, "I live on a small farm south of Madison with my wife and four kids," meaning that has been subjected to way heavier dosages of Scott Walker lies than any human brain should be asked to withstand. He also tells us that he's a regular contributor to the blog Uppity Wisconsin ("Progressive News from Wisconsin") and to The Progressive, where he contributed this piece (links and pictures onsite):

Did Walker's Nancy Reagan Anointment Story Really Happen? Nope.



By JUD LOUNSBURY on March 12, 2015

At the 2013 Milwaukee County Republican Party's annual Reagan Day dinner Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker told a story that he said,"gives me a shiver just talking about it."

That would be the story about how Nancy Reagan was so amazed by Scott Walker's recall victory that she invited him to come speak at the Reagan Library. (Walker failed to mention that ninety-one-year old Nancy Reagan is more of a figurehead of the Reagan Foundations that signs dozens of invites to people every year to speak at Reagan Library as part of the Reagan Forum series. You know who else has scored these special invites? Dennis Miller, Mark Levin, and Dennis Prager. In fact, the person that spoke after Walker was -- drum roll, please -- Greg Gutfeldt!)

OK, sorry—back to Walker's story.

Before Walker gave his speech, he scored a special meeting with Nancy Reagan. (Reality check: It wasn't that special; it happens to many Reagan Forum participants.) So, they get to talking, and Walker tells her that his recall election happened on the anniversary of her husband's death: June 5.
After Walker makes this point, Mrs. Reagan doesn't push her panic button. And she doesn't dismiss what he is saying as the ramblings of a pathological narcissist with delusions of grandeur. Instead she is apparently awestruck. (You'll find out why we can assume that in a second.)

Then Walker leaves her home in Bel Air and goes to the Reagan Library to give his speech. As he is walking by some of the exhibits on display and, well, let's let Walker tell the rest:

"One of the other great privileges I had, that was unbeknownst to me, that they had set up, was, we came around the corner on the tour, before I gave a speech to about a thousand people at the library, and the curator there, had, I see him and he's got white gloves and he's got something in his hand.

"And they brought over a pair of white gloves for me and he said, 'No one has touched this since President Reagan. It is his mother's Bible that he took the oath of office on. Mrs. Reagan would like you to hold and take a picture with it."

At this point the crowd makes a collective gasp. Several "awwwwhhh"s break out and then the they break into an applause as Walker slowly nods.

In other words, Nancy Reagan was so impressed with Walker that she arranged this quasi-anointment ceremony of letting Walker be the first to touch the Reagan Bible since Reagan. This is huge! In Republican politics, this is like the Pope arranging a swig from the Holy Grail!

In other news—wait, there's more to this story? Shut the front door!—I got in touch with Jennifer Torres, who is the artifacts curator at the Reagan Library. Torres said Walker did in fact, get his picture taken with the Reagan inauguration Bible, but that is the only part of the story that is true.

When asked specifically if Nancy Reagan had arranged for Walker to hold the Reagan Bible, Torres said in a email that it was Walker, not Nancy Reagan, that made the request to have his picture taken with the Bible—and that Walker made the request before he visited with Nancy Reagan or even flew out to California:

Gov. Walker requested to view the Bible while he was at the Library for a speaking engagement. The Bible is periodically removed from exhibit in order to rotate the pages on display. We decided to remove the Bible the day Gov. Walker was in town to comply with his request, took the Bible back to collections after the photo, and re-installed it on exhibit a few days later.

What about the stuff about Reagan being the last person to touch it? Eh, not so much:

Since the President's passing, several staff members and conservators have handled the Bible, all while wearing gloves. It is unknown if President Reagan was the last to have to have touched the Bible without gloves, but it is doubtful. It may have been handled by family or staff before it was brought to the Library. Once the Bible was at the Library, it would only be handled with gloves per collections management practices. The Bible was brought to the Library in 1992, and was placed on exhibit at some point. It was removed from exhibit in 2010 during the renovation, and re-installed in 2011.

When asked if Walker is the only visiting dignitary to have handled the Bible since the library opened, Torres said that he was, but he is also likely the only visiting dignitary to have ever made such a request.

There you have it folks: there was nothing special about Walker holding and getting his picture take with the Reagan Bible. Except, of course, in Walker's mind.

And that should concern you.

I think Jud is right that it should concern us. It should concern anyone who considers the Lie-Master a potentially serious person in American public life -- a number that, unfortunately for them, includes all the citizens of Wisconsin. But then, enough of them have voted for the SOB three times now.

Might it matter to them, not to mention the Republicans who''ll be choosing a lucky winner out of the pool of 2016 presidential candidates, that the man habitually lies to create pretty packages for the ideological poison perpetually boiling up out of his head?

It might be nice, for starters, if they at least knew. I'm not saying they wouldn't still support him, but at least they'd know.

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James Brady (1940-2014)

Sign a remembrance card on the Brady
Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence website



"I come before you today as not just another pretty face, but out of sheer talent."

-- Jim Brady, to a press corps aware that First Lady-to-be
Nancy Reagan had wanted a Ken doll as press secretary

"Neurosurgeon Arthur I. Kobrine later recalled telling the president's personal physician about Mr. Brady: 'It's a terrible injury. I don't think he has a chance. I don't think he's going to make it, but I think we should try.' "

-- from Jon Thurber's Washington Post obituary

"The bullies have succeeded too often. They have made cowardly lions out of too many members of Congress. . . .

"I implore our president and our Congress: Take a risk. Re-direct your moral compass. Plow new ground in your consciousness. Say 'no' to those who won't retreat from an ideology that is fixated on weapons of war that are turned on babies and grandmothers alike. An ideology that helps assassinate dreamers and the dreams they hold dear. That litters across our fruited plains the bloodstains of innocents. That has kept us from forming that more perfect union, and pistol-whipped us into a seemingly endless cycle of wounding, maiming and murdering one another."

-- Sarah Brady, in a January 2011 CNN Opinion piece,
"Sarah Brady to Obama: Lead on gun control"

by Ken

I hope it isn't necessary to explain the significance and sadness of the news of the death of Ronald Reagan's first presidential press secretary, Jim Brady. He didn't ask to become a hero, and certainly wouldn't have chosen the circumstances that led him to it, but I don't know that there's a better word for the role that he, his wife Sarah, and the rest of the family took on in the wake of the calamitous events of March 30, 1981.

I worry, though, that over the decades, as the cloud of gun-happy insanity has enshrouded the land, the heroic efforts of the Bradys to bring some measure of sanity to national gun policy have already been forgotten -- thanks to the coalition forged by the country's violence-for-profit merchants of mayhem and death with rank-and-file U.S. gun-worshippers in the death grip of Tiny Penis Syndrome.

Even before that calamitous day, Jim Brady had established himself as a decent guy, setting himself apart from the general run of Reagan appointees and from the general run of presidential press secretaries. The class he and Sarah showed when they were put to such an extreme test set them way above most of us mere mortals. It would be nice if Jim's death inspired some revived respect for the work the Bradys tried so hard to do via the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

James S. Brady, Reagan’s press secretary and survivor of 1981 shooting, dies at 73

By Jon Thurber
August 4 at 2:21 PM

James S. Brady, the often-irreverent press secretary to President Ronald Reagan who was shot in the head during an assassination attempt on his boss in 1981 and who became an enduring symbol of the fight against unfettered access to guns in American society, died Aug. 4 at age 73.

The Associated Press reported that his death was announced by his family. No other details were immediately available.

Mr. Brady remained an influential presence in the gun-control debate decades after the shooting that left him partially paralyzed. He and his wife, Sarah, often described as the “first family” of gun control, battled six years to pass legislation that in 1993 ushered in background checks for handguns bought from federally licensed dealers.

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"Liars and their enablers now work hand in glove -- mendocracy is the regime that governs us now" (Rick Perlstein)

Postscript: Keith Olbermann's announcement
(see below)

Ronald Reagan laid the groundwork for the Right's official

severing of the country from the reality standard.

"In researching [the '80s], I've been surprised to discover the extent to which Ronald Reagan explicitly built his appeal around the notion that it was time to stop challenging the powerful. A new sort of lie took over: that the villains were not those deceiving the nation, but those exposing the deceit -- those, as Reagan put it in his 1980 acceptance speech, who 'say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith.' They were just so, so negative. According to the argument Reagan consistently made, Watergate revealed nothing essential about American politicians and institutions -- the conspirators 'were not criminals at heart.'"

-- Rick Perlstein, in "Inside the GOP's Fact-Free
Nation," in Mother Jones

by Ken

For the benefit of new readers, since the 2008 presidential election campaign, I've been reduced to periodic rants about Republicans and the Right generally having officially gone off the standard, no longer feeling any obligation or indeed connection to reality, so there should be no surprise at my responsiveness to our friend (and favorite working historian) Rick Perlstein's new Mother Jones piece, which tackles this very subject.

Rick, you may recall, after his landmark books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, has been immersed in the next turning point in the conservatizing of America, the Reagan era. And it's hard to look at that period without grappling with the loosening of the bonds of reality.

Reagan himself had a decidedly shaky relation to reality, quite independent of the descent into Alzheimer's. Indeed, while there's a political career's worth of evildoing that the sainted Ronnie has to answer for, I've always thought his most toxic legacy was preaching to an all-too-eager American public the happy-making doctrine that reality is whatever you think it is, whatever you want it to be, whatever makes you feel best. But it wasn't till that 2008 election that I perceived that an entire side of the American political spectrum had abandoned any feeling of responsibility to truth.

It's been hard to think how there could fail to be consequences.

Of course long before 2008 the Bush regime had been hard at work permanently sundering all links between its pronouncements and truth. This is what I found myself pondering as I read -- with Rick's piece already resounding in my head -- today's ThinkProgress Progress Report, "The Neverending Story," which looks into the documentation about the abuses in Guantanamo provided by the latest WikiLeaks cache of more than 700 documents (with a link is to The Guardian's coverage).

THE DETAILS: The Times editorializes today that the documents serve as "a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created" at Gitmo and "describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration's system for deciding detainees' guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released." "Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture," the Times editorial notes, adding that suicides there "were regarded only as a public relations p roblem.& quot; The documents show that there were 158 detainees "who did not receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were assessed to be 'of little intelligence value' with no ties to or significant knowledge about Al Qaeda or the Taliban." The Guardian notes that 212 Afghans at Gitmo were either "entirely innocent," "mere Taliban conscripts" or "had been transferred to Guantanamo with no reason for doing so." Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim. The so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Qahtani, "was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself." And U.S. forces held Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al-Jazeera, for 6 years before finally letting him go. Hajj had insisted he was just a journalist and he went back to work for Al-Jazeera after his release.

There are, of course, many discussion-worthy aspects to this story, but I bring it up tonight as for its demonstration of the purity of the Bush regime's commitment to untruthfulness. At every step in the process outlined above, it's clear that no consideration of any sort was given to telling the truth about the gathering, treatment, or ultimate disposition of the Guantanamo detainees, any more than such consideration was given to any aspect of our involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq -- with perhaps occasional semi-exceptions where a bit or two of reality may have been judged tactically superior to the best lie that could be concocted.

Of course Republicans didn't invent the concept of government lying. In his swell Mother Jones Rick Perlstein takes us for a stroll down the memory lane of government and media fibbing, going back to the young William Randolph Hearst's tactic of "Just Making Stuff Up" in his eagerness to help foment the Spanish-American War, then jumping to the same feat performed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. [Links and footnotes onsite.]

"Some of our boys are floating around in the water," Lyndon Johnson told congressmen to goad them into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing war in 1964, after a supposed attack on an American PT boat. "Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish," LBJ observed later, after the deed was done. That resolution inaugurated a decade of official American military activities in Southeast Asia (unofficially, we had been carrying out secret acts of war for years). A full-scale air war began the following February, after the enemy shelled the barracks of 23,000 American "advisers" in a South Vietnamese town called Pleiku. But that was just a pretext. "Pleikus are like streetcars," LBJ's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, said—if you miss one, you can always just hop on another. The bombing targets had been in the can for months, even as LBJ was telling voters on the campaign trail, "We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

It would have been possible all along for some intrepid soul to drop the dime on the whole thing. There were many who knew or suspected the truth, but with a villain as universally feared as communism was during the Cold War years, denying the facts felt like the only patriotic thing to do.

In the course of tracing back the hit to the reality standard engineered by the Nixon administration in the speech Vice President Spiro Agnew was charged with delivering in November 1969, Rick delivers a droll and punishing blow to one of my favorite exemplars of media lying and corruption, George Will.

Agnew's remarks reinforced a mood that had been building since at least the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when many viewers complained about the media images of police beating protesters. By the 1980s the trend was fully apparent: News became fluffier, hosts became airier—less assured of their own moral authority. (Around this same time, TV news lost its exceptional status within the networks—once accepted as a "loss leader" intended to burnish their prestige, it was increasingly subject to bottom-line pressures.)

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged "balance" over truth-telling—even when one side was lying. It's a real and profound change—one stunningly obvious when you review a 1973 PBS news panel hosted by Bill Moyers and featuring National Review editor George Will, both excoriating the administration's "Watergate morality." Such a panel today on, say, global warming would not be complete without a complement of conservatives, one of them probably George Will, lambasting the "liberal" contention that scientific facts are facts—and anyone daring to call them out for lying would be instantly censured. It's happened to me more than once—on public radio, no less.

In the same vein, when the Obama administration accused Fox News of not being a legitimate news source, the DC journalism elite rushed to admonish the White House. Granted, they were partly defending Major Garrett, the network's since-departed White House correspondent and a solid journalist—but in the process, few acknowledged that under Roger Ailes, another Nixon veteran, management has enforced an ideological line top to bottom.

Rick concludes:

The protective bubble of the "civility" mandate also seems to extend to the propagandists whose absurdly doctored stories and videos continue to fool the mainstream media. From blogger Pamela Geller, originator of the "Ground Zero mosque" falsehood, to Andrew Breitbart's video attack on Shirley Sherrod -- who lost her job after her anti-discrimination speech was deceptively edited to make her sound like a racist -- to James O'Keefe's fraudulent stingagainst National Public Radio, right-wing ideologues "lie without consequence," as a desperate Vincent Foster put it in his suicide note nearly two decades ago. But they only succeed because they are amplified by "balanced" outlets that frame each smear as just another he-said-she-said "controversy."

And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it's not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It's just about anyone -- a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera -- who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence -- that's stipulated, as the lawyers say. And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs -- the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that. What's new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove. That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now.

I might just add, as I've argued before, that there's a third component to the Lying Triangle: a large segment of the American public that not only is willing to accept wholesale lying but demands it, often violently. Reality is in a heap o' trouble.


POSTSCRIPT: KEITH OLBERMANN INVOKES THE PRACTICE

OF "BALANCING A LIE FOR EVERY TRUTH" (HE'S AGAINST)


"I wanted to go somewhere where I could expand on and enlarge upon the work I'd already done, a place where journalistic integrity and analytical honesty would never be compromised by corporate synergy, a place where no one would ever proclaim the ultimate dishonesty: that balancing a lie for every truth was somehow fair. I found that place in Current TV."

-- Keith Olbermann, announcing the start date, Monday, June 20 (live at 8pm ET/5pm PT, with repeats at 11pm ET/8pm PT and 2am ET/11pm PT), of his new Current TV show, to be called (are you ready for this?) Countdown with Keith Olbermann

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"Just say no!": For Republicans saying no has long been "the hope and promise of the future"

Our New Jersey colleague Jay Lassiter has retraced and distilled this quintessential GOP message with specific application to the "Just Say No"-ers in his home state, but suspects it may have wider application -- like to a Repug near you.

Jay explains: "This project began as a snarky fun exercise to test out the new iLife '09 (it's fierce, BTW) and ended up being a creationist 'theory' even a social scientist might love." He couldn't resist sharing it, and neither could we. -- Ken

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