I don’t normally get upset about Trump. My feeling is that we’ve got to have a Republican president, it’s better that it be someone who is poor politician. I mean, Marco Rubio would be bombing Iran and have a 60% approval rating right now (the latter because of the economy).
But certain things do make me hope that someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. One is the continued popularity of David Brooks, sixteen years after he cheerled the Iraq War with North Korean-style propaganda about Dear Leader W. Another is that Ken Starr is still on my tv sometimes, even after heading up a rape factory at Baylor. But what pisses me off most these days is Jonathan Turley. He was everywhere in 1998 telling people that Clinton had to be impeached. He also thought that W should be impeached. He mused about having Obama impeached. And now he’s using the old “if my dog has a fit, you must acquit” defense in support of Trump.
“I get it: You are mad,” he testified. “The president is mad. My Democratic friends are mad. My Republican friends are mad. My wife is mad. My kids are mad. Even my dog seems mad — and Luna is a goldendoodle and they don’t get mad. So we’re all mad.
I don’t think that this goes in healthy societies. There’s never a shortage of hacks and liars but couldn’t we at least get a new crop of hacks and liars every 20 years or so? Is that asking for too much?
Also too, let’s raise a little more money for the seventeen most vulnerable House incumbents. They’re going to have to vote for impeachment soon and many of them are in districts that Trump carried.
Barbara
The fact that the only person they can muster to provide testimony is the same guy they put in the sandbox 20 years ago, this time saying something totally opposite and yet somehow grounded in the same constitutional text, gives me a bit of assurance regarding the relative sanity of at least certain types of people.
Kent
Trump is nothing more than a mirror that reflects people’s true character. You hold him up to a GOP Senator, or White Evangelical, or someone like Turley, and what gets reflected back is a depiction of their true nature.
He is conveniently providing the service of stripping away all the pretense and showing us who these people really are. I just hope to God we still have a country left.
Derelict
Considering how many convicted criminals from the Reagan administration were pardoned by Poppy Bush so they could serve in HIS administration–many of whom were then hired by Dubya’s administration, and a few of whom are now part of Trump’s administration, well, who says Republicans don’t believe in recycling?
MattF
Has Turley come out for impeaching Hillary? I assume he’s done all the necessary research, one shouldn’t allow all that good work to go to waste.
Mnemosyne
@Kent:
He’s been pretty useful for figuring out who is and isn’t an ally on the “left” as well. Way too many people who insist that he isn’t so bad, or that it’s all Hillary’s fault anyway, or that Trump just proves that both parties are the same because argle bargle duopoly. ?
Jay
Jeffro
Anything that gives us a better class of political pundit hacks is ok with m…wait a minute. Do we really want newer and better hacks? Everyone knows what they’re getting with Brooksie & Co and can tune him out accordingly. Every time his “column” comes out, it’s like seeing something disgusting left behind in the toilet bowl (only even more odious)…no need to waste any time on it, just FLUSH.
Jay
@MattF:
by all accounts, he’s working on it, along with the retroactive impeachment of Jimmy Carter.
West of the Rockies
Well, at least The Coulterwocky has rather disappeared of late. She went all-in on Trump, then bailed, and now is sailing the world on a tall ship, barred from setting foot on dry land, a shrew without a country.
Jay
@Jeffro:
according to some theories and models, seasonal selective harvesting of the punditocracy should lead to a better strain of pundit, more so when indicators of mediocracy and inbreeding are used as selectors.
Jay
PJ
I think it’s actually a good sign that they have to rely on old hacks, because it means they are having a hard time finding new hacks that are acceptable to the base and the media. In terms of media-acceptable writers, who has come up on the right in the last 20 years? You’ve got your wishy-washy Chunky Reese Witherspoon for tone-policing and Megan McArgkebargle for mathematically impaired knee-jerk libertarianism, but these are just younger versions of David Broder and Peggy Noonan. The real new Conservative “thinkers” are white supremacists like Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer, because conservatism has abandoned any ideas that aren’t about serving the rich and elevating white people, but they can’t really put them on TV anymore without being called on it (which shows our media has learned a little in the last three years). That’s why we get Jonathan Turley again, who has no real legal or factual defense to impeachment of Trump, because there is none. All he can argue is that it doesn’t look or feel right.
Kent
@Mnemosyne:
Exactly: For example. From November 2016 she couldn’t even wait for his inauguration: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/why-democratic-rep-tulsi-gabbard-met-donald-trump-n686976
Jay
Soprano2
I got so pissed at the 1A program news roundup today, and NPR in general, since they’ve only been using Turley quotes and only interviewing Turley about his testimony. If you listened to NPR this week the only way you’d know that any other experts testified at the Judiciary Committee hearing, or anything about what they said, is the fainting spells over one of them saying the name “Barron”. Otherwise, I don’t think I’ve heard more than a sentence or two on Morning Edition or All Things Considered about what anyone but Turley had to say, and they didn’t really challenge him that much.
rikyrah
@Jay: 
only the best people
rikyrah
where’s the picture of the baby :)
trollhattan
Turley has a really good publicist.
mrmoshpotato
@Soprano2: How DARE you say his name?!?!?! Leave the kid out of this! :)
Jay
@PJ:
Shapiro, Convicted Felon D’nesh,……
the thing is, with grandparents who drank the koolaide, parents who drank the koolaide, and having a steady diet of koolaide since before bottle feedings,
all the cool little Randian cyborgs want to be Nazis or Tankies.
still, it would be nice if the MSM as a whole, would utilize their archives to show that Turley was either full of shit then, with what he claims now,
or he is full of shit now, with what he claimed then,
or he is just full of shit both then and now,
rather than us relying on woke bloggers and twitteratti,
catclub
@Jay: I would be in favor of fraud in the SWIFT system if it was disabling the ability of the US to police trade with Iran.
Cacti
Turley is human garbage. Beneath the scholarly veneer, his views on impeachment are guided by one fundamental principle:
IOKIYAR
trollhattan
@Jay:
Antivax activists should all book flights to Samoa, go out across the nation and tell them to hold strong against the current vaccination campaign. And attend all of the many funerals.
cmorenc
Speaking of David Brooks, his NYT column today “I Used to be a Socialist” is a rousing cheer for capitalism’s innovative virtues and a bronx cheer for socialism’s clumsy flaws – yet way at the end of his column, he points out the Scandinavian countries as positive examples of freely innovative capitalism tempered by a social safety net smoothing out the socially disruptive aspects of capitalism.
Brooks is too happily focused to realize that the goal of most US progressives is a Scandinavian-type hybrid system, precisely the positive counter-example he gives to deadening socialism.
catclub
@Cacti: I think his ‘principle’ is
Whatever gets me on the most broadcasts.
It has worked fabulously well to take the GOP side here.
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
@Soprano2: I’ve given up on NPR. I know they’ve been “both-siding” for a while now but lately they’ve been just plain rolling over and playing dead in interviews.
BobbyK
Really? All new dems and blue dogs? Most of them might as well be republicans.
Jay
Raoul
@cmorenc: he points out the Scandinavian countries as positive examples of freely innovative capitalism tempered by a social safety net smoothing out the socially disruptive aspects of capitalism
I visit my extended family in Sweden every couple of years. I’d live in that ‘socialist hellhole’ in a heartbeat — except:
Note that I didn’t mention taxes as a reason not to go. I’d have to pay out the snoot. But I’d be able to afford it, and I understand how the system works. I agree with it!
schrodingers_cat
There are people who vote D and think NYT is liberal and that David Brooks is a reasonable conservative.
Jay
Active school shooter, yesterday, didn’t even really make the news,
Mary G
Barbara
@Mary G: Ruh-ro.
Gin & Tonic
@Mary G: No need to worry, I’m sure Jared will figure this all out.
Joe Falco
We will always have hacks, liars, cheaters and various priests and priestesses of the nativist and all kinds of -phobic orders in the country until they all die out. We’re only recently seeing the slimeballs of the Nixon era slowly lurching their way into the grave. I predict we’ll still hear from people like Brooks and Turley as long as they can be wheeled out to make one last gasp in deference to their authoritarian masters or curse those working towards saving our republic.
trollhattan
@Mary G:
Wonder if he used a bone saw?
Quicksand
@schrodingers_cat:
I hate making this change, but I honestly believe it’s true. He’s insidious.
Jay
Roger Moore
The problem isn’t a lack of new hacks- e.g. Tomi Lahren, Molly Hemingway, etc.- as it is a refusal of the old hacks to go away or at least change their shticks. Honestly, I think this is a key motivator for some of the Never Trump columnists; saying we have to side with the Democrats to get rid of the corrupting influence of Trump at least gives them fertile material for new columns.
Hungry Joe
NPR did a profile of Mike Pence a couple of weeks ago. It was a tongue bath, a love fest. Included about a 10-second sound bite on the Indiana anti-LGBTQ bill he championed and that blew up in his face; the rest was about this godly soul who was doing his best to steer Trump toward the angels. I almost broke my 40-year-old National Panasonic AM/FM radio, purchased by a former girlfriend in the duty-free shop in the Hong Kong airport. Now, THAT would have been a tragedy.
Jay
Ruckus
@Jeffro:
Problem is that turd never goes away. They are still here providing the same – or worse smell, every damn day. I’m not going to make a list of them, first of all I’m eating, second of all their names and bullshit are known.
And there is a reason for that, and that is the wealthy class wants them around, to stir up shit, to provide a reason for all the pain and suffering, so that the wealthy can at the very least stay wealthy and at the very worst can get far wealthier. Just look who pays all the odious people, who is behind all the bullshit, who gets the people riled up and continuing to pay to be screwed, supposedly in the name of “liberty,” but really in the name of money. And no, this is nothing new, this is as old as time, only the speed and width of delivery is current. TV and radio is faster, and spreads farther than a newspaper ever could, even the FTFNYT. And it spreads because people are being screwed, as they are voting for the people screwing them. They don’t connect the dots because that is called a lie and that the real thieves are the out group that is with the wealthy, and that’s people who actually want equality, liberals. Research history and see what really caused most revolutions, not necessarily the stated reasons, but the unstated one, the reason that most revolutions have happened in history. Extremely unequal wealth. Be it nobility in monarchies, the leaders in dictatorships, the just wealthy in democracies.
Turner Hedenkoff
+1 for the “Taxi Driver” reference. I always wanted to do a mash-up of the love theme from that movie and “Here’s That Rainy Day.”
Jay
@Roger Moore:
it’s an Ok Boomer thing,
Brooks et al wouldn’t/won’t retire, so the middle management Wingnuts never got the promotion and a bunch have drifted off into PAC grifting,
the Production Supervisors like Toni have been stuck in their jobs so long that they have sent one too many “accidental” send all memo’s that has burned them up on social media,
and the new hires in the mailroom are Jacob Wohls because all the cool kids want to be social media influencers, DJ’s, Nazis or Tankies instead of becoming a Corporate ReThug Pundit.
LongHairedWeirdo
Some people talk about the GOP like they were discussing poly sci archaeology, “some political parties do not display tolerance; that is, they don’t believe they other political parties have a right to govern.”
They talk about this as if it’s just some random fact, like the color of cars they prefer to drive, and not like it’s a hideous character flaw, like a mugger’s belief that you don’t have a right to keep your cash and valuables, if they’d rather have them.
It’s true – they’ve been preaching about how only “conservatives” are any good at governance, or being decent human beings, for so long, there *is* an attitude that only they deserve to hold office. But even the people who notice it don’t want to be, you know, *partisan*, and point out that it’s unamerican (and I mean that literally – against our founding principles).
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That’s really the problem, an older generation way passed their sale by date who are refusing to let go. The comparison between GW and Trump is stark – the Iraq War was a sub-optimal solution to a real geopolitical problem, were The Wall is the unworkable solution to a completely made up problem. With GW there was way to much wishful thinking, with Trump reality is no were in sight.
Ironically we must escape the same disaster the Bush admin caused with Trump because his administration is so utterly incompetent they fail at even screwing up.
catclub
I just read an editorial at Bloomberg on how the editorial board will approach the candidacy of Mike Bloomberg – who owns Bloomberg. They claim they will be scrupulously fair and not have any unsigned editorials.
namby-pamby.
I think they are missing a chance to proclaim that, just as the Trump Organization was deployed as a weapon in the campaign for Donald Trump, Likewise the entire Bloomberg Organization will be deployed as a weapon in this campaign for Mike Bloomberg. Anything less would be self-defeating.
sdhays
@Hungry Joe: I stopped listening (and donating) to NPR several years ago because I couldn’t stand their political coverage. It’s both vapid and biased. I miss the other coverage, but I don’t mix the extra dose of rage I was getting every day from the NPR political hacks.
Marcopolo
@Jay: That makes it more than 10% of the entire GOP House caucus that is retiring. And it’s not finished yet.
randy khan
@Marcopolo:
They’ve discovered that being in the minority is no fun. And some of them have discovered that the polling isn’t getting any better for them since last year, with a high-turnout (that is, Dem-favoring) Presidential year coming up.
And probably a handful of them are tired of having to carry Trump’s water, although they’ll never say that.
janesays
You know, I don’t usually think about it in those terms, but that’s actually a really good way to look at it. If one of the “normal” Republican candidates had gotten elected instead, we’d still be getting the same shitty policies, the same shitty judges (maybe not Kavanaugh and all his baggage, but his ideological twin without the rapey history), and if anything, that person would probably be more successful at enacting their agenda, because they’d at least be marginally competent. Oh, and with the economy being where it is, they would be cruising to a 350+ EV landslide re-election.
The fact that we got Trump instead may be the only reason we have a chance to defy historical trends and defeat an incumbent president during a booming economy.
dopey-o
@Turner Hedenkoff: OK Boomer. I saw that ‘Nam era physical reference. I also got a letter that started “Greetings from the President of the United States.”
dww44
@Hungry Joe: There were apparently others who felt as you did. Did you see this piece about Soledad O’Brien’s pushback to NPR?
https://www.salon.com/2019/11/27/press-watch-soledad-obrien-attacks-a-pence-puff-piece-sets-off-anti-npr-twitter-rampage/