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Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

I really should read my own blog.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

How stupid are these people?

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Late Night Creepshow Open Thread: Whither Bannon?

Late Night Creepshow Open Thread: Whither Bannon?

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(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)

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Now that Steve Bannon is (theoretically) in eclipse — Vanity Fair even found a handful of former loyalists willing to be quoted denying their dark lord before cockcrow — his true disciples are debating what he might’ve done differently in the civil war against the Kushner/Cohn/Mnuchin globalist oligarchs. Olivia Nuzzi, professional sharpshooter, reports for NYMag: “The Alt-Right Is Debating Whether Bannon Needs a Better Press Strategy“:

Now that Steve Bannon has been temporarily or permanently sidelined by President Donald Trump, his nationalist allies — people who formerly identified as “alt-right,” but now reject that label as it has become synonymous with white supremacy — are debating what their man in the White House did wrong and what he might do to salvage the situation. One of the key questions up for debate is whether Bannon should have made better use of ideologically sympathetic media outlets — when he ran Breitbart News, he described it as “the platform” for the alt-right — to get out his side of the story.

The chief strategist to the president might have done better job of holding onto power, the thinking goes, if he were talking to those who want what he wants and have the benefit of seeing things the way they appear outside of the bubble of his “war room,” the name Bannon’s given his West Wing office…

In some ways, the question of whether Bannon should be cultivating more allies in the press is part of a larger debate over his operating style in the White House — which is to operate in isolation. “I’m not doing this to have friends,” he told me. “I don’t socialize a lot, I don’t bring people into my life. This is like being in the Navy, this is like a duty. I don’t enjoy this every day. This is not living; this is a kind of existence.”

Though he brought into the White House some of his own staff — Julia Hahn from Breitbart; Andrew Surabian from the Tea Party Express and Alexandra Preate, his personal flack — he has spent little political capital fighting for high-level strategists with whom he could align in ideological disputes…

Perhaps coincidentally, questions are being raised about the oft-told tale that Bannon made $32 million on a canny Seinfeld deal. It wouldn’t really matter, at this point, whether he made his grubstake off the Hollywood version of a scratch ticket… except that the alternative would cast his political success as entirely the product of semi-legitimate Robert & Rebekah Mercer money. Not a good look for a self-styled swashbuckling free spirit, at the very least.

But then, Bannon’s expulsion from Mar-a-Lago Eden would be a loss to Media Village Idiots far more “respectable” than the Pepe kkkrew… even those at the Grey Lady…

Reader Interactions

27Comments

  1. 1.

    piratedan

    well, if the ideological soul of the Alt-Right is Bannon (as alleged) and Trump sticks a shiv in him… will the hard core Fascists simply forgive and forget? Will there be a night of the long-knives within the GOP itself? In a way, I’m scared that there will be and we’ll get someone who’s a hard-core nazi with better political sense than these guys. Then again, I won’t shed a tear watching the disarray within, just trying to temper that with the understanding that as dangerous as some of these people are, getting someone who’s ruthless and competent to pick up the pieces is also a possibility.

    Lets face it, they’re letting some of these fucking Bundy asshats point rifles at LEO’s with nary a slap, what’s to say what a jury of any of our supposed peers looks like these days. Stupid, bigoted and with no reasoning capacity outside of being zombie fodder for Faux News…

    Being honest about the travesty that has been the last three months and the astounding way in the way that the fourth estate has allowed copious amounts of latitude to this band of political brigands makes me wonder how well they would fit in to our own North American Theocratic Reich. The guys who drive the bus and put the pictures in the frames need to be outed because they’re the ones trying to keep the nation asleep and misinformed. They all must be advertising foofs because there isn’t apparently a journalist among them.

  2. 2.

    Jewish Steel

    debating what their man in the White House did wrong and what he might do to salvage the situation

    Bannon should try to bully some of those corn pone Freedom Caucusers again. Maybe this time it will work.

  3. 3.

    Elizabelle

    That’s a great cartoon.

    Maybe the truth is actually: use the subterranean entrance, down the block. Think of the brand, guys.

  5. 5.

    Viva BrisVegas

    Flynn, Assange, Putin, Bannon.

    The list of people Trump is jettisoning as he strains for some elusive respectability, like Tantalus reaching for an apple, just gets longer and longer.

    I imagine Vlad is reviewing his options, as well as his Trump Golden Shower videos, right now.

  7. 7.

    amk

    Isn’t the navy supposed to be all about group efforts? The pitiful racist pos is trying to paint himself as some kinda fucking solo war hero.

  8. 8.

    Elizabelle

    Glenn Thrush is a bit of a problem, isn’t he? He’s one of the co-authors on the recent Fuck the Fucking Fascist-Enabling New York Times’ article about Trump’s BOLD UNPREDICTABLE foreign policy. Most readers weren’t having any of that normalizing attempt.

    Why yes, Thrush was a senior writer at Politico. The colonizing continues. (That said, I’d seen some stuff from Thrush that seemed accurate and non-biased. But that “BOLD!” article was right up there with the Times’ Clinton Derangement level of campaign coverage.)

  9. 9.

    Shalimar

    “Intellectual foundation”? WTF? Bannon’s goal is starting a civil war that destroys the current U.S. government and replaces it with white supremacy. He’s a nihilist. Nihilists do not build fucking foundations.

  10. 10.

    ThresherK

    A Bannon friend likened him to a terminally ill family member who had been moved to hospice care.

    My new test is to find out who’ll skip the hospice step and just admit they want to smother him with a pillow.

  12. 12.

    Mary G

    @Elizabelle: He’s a bit of a puzzle. Most of the time I think he’s a bog-standard Fox News type pretending to be a real journo, especially on Twitter where he seems completely right-biased.

  15. 15.

    Brachiator

    So, let’s see. Trump dumps aids who make him look bad. He doesn’t change direction or reassess his goals.

    Bannon may be on the way out, but Jeff Sessions is still attorney general. I keep waiting to hear him shout that “The South Has Risen Again.”

    Media hacks complain that Bannon’s main problem was that he did not sufficiently kiss their ass, uh, I mean cultivate typical Beltway relationships.

  17. 17.

    weaselone

    Looking back with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, this almost seems to have been inevitable. Bannon has an agenda and an ethos as vile and despicable as it is. Trump’s about the grift and what he saw on Fox last night, but mainly about the grift. That power would ultimately shift from Bannon to Trump’s two least incompetent heirs seems somehow natural, like water flowing downhill or morons shooting themselves with their own rifles.

  18. 18.

    NotMax

    who formerly identified as “alt-right,” but now reject that label as it has become synonymous with white supremacy

    “has become?” There wasn’t so much as a fraction of a nanosecond when it wasn’t synonymous with white supremacy. The whole point of its coinage by adherents was to create a (seemingly) more palatable construction.

  19. 19.

    Dave

    @amk: That’s something that jumped out to me as well. Say what you will about the military it is not an isolating solo effort unless you are in command (and not even necessarily then though I’m given to understand that the for the Captain of a ship it is) or a complete and total antisocial asshole who everyone hates. Now we know Steve topped out at LT and we also have quite a bit of public info available regarding him so I’m leaning towards option two. Your mileage may but probably won’t vary.

  21. 21.

    rikyrah

    Eh. His racist White Supremacist azz is still in.the.White.House. Along with Miller and the.Nazi. Until they.are all gone, along.with Attorney General White Citizens Council….

    Don’t believe a word of him being in trouble.

  22. 22.

    Ella in New Mexico

    Stupid Thrush:

    Whether u respect him or not Bannon is a deep if narrow reader who is trying to create an ideological/intellectual foundation for Trumpism.

    Strike “Trumpism” and insert “His Manifesto” and you’ve got the Unabomber.

  23. 23.

    ET

    Bannon could have done things differently but he went the exact direction he wanted to go. He wanted things that way so they were. That there is a downside is just something he had to live with.

    I think his real problem was that he forgot that that Trump’s ego was huge and that Trump was like Twitter – needs to be fed constantly. Bannon likely forgot his place and Trump wanted to remind him. The Trump kids have learned this over a lifetime, Bannon was late to the game. Assume he sticks around if he learns that lesson he can be Trump’s bitch for however long Trump is around.

  24. 24.

    Splitting Image

    Perhaps coincidentally, questions are being raised about the oft-told tale that Bannon made $32 million on a canny Seinfeld deal.

    Good. The show lost a bit of lustre for me when I found out Bannon was involved in it. Time to resume binge-watching.

  26. 26.

    Dmbeaster

    Whether u respect him or not Bannon is a deep if narrow reader who is trying to create an ideological/intellectual foundation for Trumpism

    Holy fuck. What a biased piece of shit, and just how much is revealed by this remark. This from the alleged NYT which dare not sully itself by calling torture “torture” lest it project some form of judgment on the shit stirring conduct of a past administration. This is just another form of deep bias trying to provide cover for the unacceptable, while looking down on those who openly describe Bannon’s nihilism as allegedly “biased”,, when in fact it is the essence of true journalism.

    Peddling blatant bias under the cover of alleged objectivity. What a douche nozzle.

  27. 27.

    John M. Burt

    @amk: Yes, as Randi Rhodes is quick to point out, the military encourages group effort and group cohesion. IOW, the military builds Liberals.
    The military is also an institution in which people from all over the country are thrown together, which is a really good thing. I think we ought to bring back the draft, make a Service Year a routine part of education between high school and college.

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