Left Jabs

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Let’s Cut Democrats a Little Slack

L et’s not sugar-coat it. Let’s call it what it is: a coup. It’s not a policy shift, a government shake-up, or a peaceful transfer of power. It’s not something Americans know much about, or are prepared to deal with. We’re witnessing a full-on fascist takeover. It would be right out of the Hitler playbook, except Hitler had nothing like the computer skills and gargantuan financial resources of the “tech bros,” Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. These two immigrants are, quite ironically, riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to launch a hostile takeover of the federal government. It’s hard to know what to do about it, and better minds than mine are now pondering it full-time. But one way to start is to get over this ridiculous notion that Democrats are somehow responsible, or asleep at the switch, or should have seen this coming. A lot of them did indeed see it coming, long ago. Elizabeth Warren, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, and dozens of other elected Democra...

What People Believe about Democrats, You Wouldn’t Believe

For me, the biggest shocker of the election was to see just how thoroughly the biggest and wildest MAGA lies have permeated the culture. Large parts of the electorate truly believe Democrats are the spawn of Satan. I mean that literally. There is a rabid religious component to this demonization that is both sickening and frightening. We’re witnessing utterly heinous acts being billed as what God wants, and there are few things scarier than zealots with power. And now they’ve got what they’ve wanted for half a century. This is the return on the right’s massive investment, first in dumbing down the American electorate, then in filling it with multiple layers of elaborate lies, pumped out through a closed media ecosystem that serves their audience a steady dose of alternative reality. Much money and thought has gone into those lies, many of which were repeated so often they replaced the truth. This long-term investment has been far more effective than I, for ...

Moving On from Legacy Media

I t’s hard to overstate the irony contained in the slogan that the Washington Post persists in printing beneath its gothic logo: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” They really ought to change it. Blue Gal, co-host of The Professional Left podcast, suggests “Democracy Died. Oopsie.” Not that the Post is alone in eviscerating our democracy, or in adding to the darkness now descending upon us. The entire legacy media, with few exceptions, is culpable. Consumers of the Post — and the New York Times , and CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc. — are supposed to have usable brains, yet it’s amazing how easily they can be manipulated into believing that “both sides” are equally bad. When the Post’s editorial board equates Trump’s pardoning of 1,600 insurrectionist thugs with Biden’s pre-emptive pardoning of public figures in serious danger of a mafia-like vendetta, you know the both-sides narrative has risen to new heights of hypocrisy. The article’s subhead says it all: “In one day, two presidents s...

A Few Random Thoughts About What’s Ahead of Us

It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who make this country go. For healthcare, for our climate, for scientists, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on social security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO and democracy and decency. It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him and guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him, too, you just don’t realize it yet. - Jimmy Kimmel, November 6, 2024 H ere we are. First full day of Trump’s second reign. I’m guessing a lot of people will be realizing a lot of unpleasant things in the next few days and weeks. So it seems a good time to revisit Jimmy Kimmel’s apt summation, which can serve us, going forward, as a sort of scorecard. We can use it to keep track of just how much of MAGA’s warped ag...

The Oligarch Agenda

Full disclosure: I am still looking for a way to write about the new reality about to descend on us. Meanwhile, please allow me to revisit this piece from August 2020, when Covid was overrunning the country. Remove the initial Covid references and we're left with a lens through which we can see the rise of the American oligarchs who are apparently taking over the country. Back then, I didn’t name names, but since the election, a number of these oligarchs have raised their profiles by an order of magnitude. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and a host of other billionaires have shown their true racist, sexist, heartless, cruel, and wildly short-sighted colors. What I wrote over four years ago is at least as true now. Fifty years of Republicanism has brought us to this. A pandemic so out of control, the world sees us as a slow-motion car crash they can’t look away from. An economic nosedive, steeper and f...

The Take-Down of Jimmy Carter Stinks to This Day

Back when Republicans were just starting to discover the political uses of deception, propaganda, and dirty tricks, one could argue that Jimmy Carter was the first real notch on their belt. Carter’s rise — from way out in left field to the White House — is well-chronicled, and I won’t try to tell it here. But at the time, the GOP was reeling from the fall of Richard Nixon, the first in a long line of bad-faith Republicans whose bad faith does not improve with age. It wasn’t just that Nixon had resigned in the face of his imminent removal from office. It was also that his Attorney General, his Chief of Staff, most of his lawyers, and a rogue’s gallery of underlings and dirty-tricksters had been convicted of felonies and sent to prison. The GOP had been exposed as a party happy to look outside the law for political gain, and they paid a heavy price for it. That was then. Since then, they’ve done far worse, far more often, and caused far more damage, yet they...