Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall Summoned to West Wing, write Identical Opinion Pieces

[This is an updated version of my earlier post from today]

Yesterday, NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro tweeted this:

Today Josh Marshal published a piece called  “She Has to Go”,  which is all about Lois Lerner, the IRS official in charge of the unit overseeing tax exempt groups, who is expected to plead The Fifth in today’s hearings. Marshall says:

Whether or not she should be fired for whatever she did in the scandal itself, deciding to take the fifth means she needs to be removed from her position.

This same morning, Ezra Klein published “Yes, Heads Should Roll at the IRS” which effectively says the same thing.

Three identical pieces would have been overkill, certainly, so Jonathan Capehart took a different assignment from the meeting at the White House. The result is a beatdown of Ta-Nehisi Coates and other black critics of Obama’s deplorable Morehouse speech, critics, with whom, Capehart insists,  poor Obama, just “can’t win.”

Meetings like this have really become a very standard feature of the Obama presidency, and I really only draw people’s attention to this stuff to confirm my overall thesis about the abject servility of these people. I mean, the only thing really newsworthy about these little message-management chats at the White House is the brazenness. I find myself wondering why they happen at all.

I get that in times of scandal or crisis, the president can’t rely, as he normally does, on the average liberal journo’s unerring ability to instinctively provide what he requires, at least not the specifics. But I do wonder why these periodic distributions of talking points require physical meetings at the White House, considering the extent to which social networks make them into very minor scandals. Why not a conference call? An email exchange? Are these methods that insecure?

It almost seems as if the spectacle of the meeting taking place is as important as the message management that comes out of it. For real journalists, Klein, Marshall and Capehart  must surely be looked upon with contempt. But for the conformists and status seekers that dominate liberal media, they look like the lucky cool kids, getting the talking points straight from the World’s Most Powerful Man himself — or at least a high-status proxy — and are fodder for fantasies about one day being included in these little tête-à-têtes themselves. These meetings helpfully signify with great precision what they all should be writing and tweeting about, in sync with Klein, Marshall and Capehart, if they ever want that day to come.

—–

Related Reading

New Shills Rising at MSNBC

The Cable News Heroism of Chris Hayes

Keeper of the Gatekeepers

A Vampire’s Tears

 

‘An Anarchist in Park Slope, LOL!!!’

This is a blog post about a Twitter fight, so first, a brief defense of blog posts about Twitter fights. If you do not require a brief defense of blog posts about Twitter fights, jump: 

1. Twitter matters. For better or worse — mostly worse — there is much more happening on Twitter than on blogs and even probably online journals. Just in word counts alone, way, way bigger. So let’s all just quit with the ‘It’s just Twitter’ thing. People can be both smart and dumb in successive lumps of 140 chars and ‘It’s Twitter’ is more often than not an alibi for those who insistently use their 140 chars unwisely. 

2. My main beat as a blogger, for the moment anyway,  is how very stupid, corrupt and toxic are the gatekeepers of what passes for left politics. Twitter offers a rare opportunity to engage with them directly, without mediation by editors or other message managers. Unfiltered dialogue with the gatekeepers of our discourse is not trivial unless all our online discourse is trivial, which is certainly up for debate but beyond the scope of this post.

3. I have a smattering of really nasty critics and they almost never engage me in long form, either in blog posts or comments here, even though they routinely troll and slime me. This makes sense because long form, of necessity, requires at least the appearance of making an argument, which is something most of my critics either consider me unworthy of — a lot of them are very nakedly status conscious — or simply wish to avoid. It’s easy for, say, a gatekeeping conformist like Elias Isquith to tone troll me on Twitter for my post on MSNBC’s Ari Melber. Harder for me  to insist he answer why, exactly, my tone clearly bothers him more than does Melber’s SOPA lobbying.

4. This is my blog. If you think it should be about other things, go do your own, or read someone else’s.

Now about this Twitter fight:

A pet peeve of mine is wealthy white people on social networks who make disparaging generalizations about white people. It’s a pet peeve not because I think white people have nothing to answer for — we do — but because while superficially this sort of thing seems to be self-implicating,  it’s actually a sort of preening, self-exoneration, akin to pundits who say ‘we’  when what they really mean are people they consider inferior. 

It seems to me that most of the people who make these generalizations  are upper middle class and beyond, and that most of the generalizations they make about ‘white people’ are as much or more about being upper middle class or wealthy as  they are about being white. As a person who was born poor and to whom many of these generalizations don’t apply — I find this really irritating.

Finally, as a purely political matter, this stuff tends to dissolve class inequality — which is critically important and should not be ignored — into a faddish and unbearably vapid sort of racial essentialism. That preening, well-heeled white people (and also wealthy people of color for that matter) would cynically use anti-racism to shield themselves from attacks on their class privilege  is not in the least surprising. But working and underclass people can still be worthy anti-racists without indulging them in it.

Last night on Twitter, Max Blumenthal, an Ivy League graduate, the son of the writer and ex Clinton aide Sydney Blumenthal,  and obviously no stranger to privilege tweeted this:

I have since learned that this was a jab at Obama’s speech at Morehouse, but at first glance, this seemed like the’white people’ thing that makes me peevish, so I tweeted, too hastily (it was late):

I wouldn’t say this even qualifies as a troll and certainly not a hard one and Blumenthal could have straightened me out or ignored it. But instead he RT’d it and  a lengthy Twitter beatdown ensued, which was probably the intent. It started with this guy, Mitch Lake:

Now even if my first tweet wasn’t what Blumenthal’s comment warranted, it didn’t seem strong enough to warrant this, the violent nature of which must certainly be familiar to anyone who ever argues with partisan liberals on Twitter.

I have a lot of exchanges with anarchists and libertarians, many of which are heated, but it is only when I engage with liberals that my interlocutors wish violence on me, and they do it quite a lot. They tell me to commit suicide or they openly hope for my assassination by drone or make light of the prospect of me being on the business end of a cop’s pepper spray can. That they do this so frequently is among the many reasons why I find them so very inauspicious as prospective political allies, especially in light of all the the apologetics they offer for state violence and repression as partisan Democrats.

You’ll note that Lake mentions that he’s made this remark before, which as I recall was in the midst of dressing me down for writing an unkind post about Comcast leftist Chris Hayes, a cardinal sin it seems for liberal Twitter trolls who risibly regard Hayes’ lofty clowning as truth speaking to power. 

Moments after Lake entered the fray,  Yasha Levine,  of NSFW Corp and The Exiled, chimed in with this:

Yasha Levine, who trolls frequently,  is part of the emerging Vast Libertarian Conspiracy cult, which I am ever more convinced is the Truther movement of unimaginative bores and self-serving fearmongerers. Along with his NSFW colleague, Mark Ames,  who also contributes to Jacobin, he is convinced that I work for the Koches, since, in their world, no one could possibly dislike these assholes like I do unless paid to pretend. (h/t @HenriTroppman)

Levine, along with Ames, is also disquietingly obsessed with finding out my true identity, and their obsession with this, alongside the ‘Kill Yourself’ tweets I routinely receive from others like Lake, argues very strongly for my continued anonymity.  Mark Ames’ preoccupation with my anonymity is especially strange, because if ever there was an argument to be made for anonymity, it’s his writing career, particularly his Russian period. But that’s for another post.

Levine and Ames are very fond of lobbing pseudo-gotchas, that is, remarks that, like much of what they write, are intended as smears and insults but leave you scratching your head. I once called Ames a brownshirt which elicited a tirade about how anti-semitic that is. Last night’s relentlessly repetitive non-gotcha was that I live in Park Slope, which, if you don’t know, is sort of Brooklyn’s Upper West Side. Apparently in the jumble of bromides, self-idolatry, and anarchist waterboarding fantasies that make up today’s liberal imagination, anarchism is entirely incompatible with residency in a pleasant, relatively affluent neighborhood.

Perhaps they misunderstood my original tweet which was simply to draw the class/race distinction that is persistently erased lately on Twitter. Perhaps they assumed that because I live in a nice neighborhood — which is actually more mixed than it’s given credit for —  I have no right to draw those distinctions, even though I am very sure Blumenthal’s life began on considerably more charmed terms than mine did and is almost certainly more charmed now. I actually went into a little detail about my background to clarify this, which elicited more ridicule. Clearly the issue was being an anarchist and living in a nice neighborhood.

I expect this nonsense from people like Levine, whose biggest claim to fame is a hit piece he and Ames wrote for the Nation about an activist who objected to a TSA patdown. But what was most surprising was how Blumenthal, who I always took to be fairly sober-minded and not an asshole, threw in with this nonsense. A sample:

Now there are a couple things that are worrying about this. One is that ostensibly intelligent adults think that a variation on the Occupiers with IPhones trope is withering rather than appallingly stupid. It’s also worrying that someone like Blumenthal would make this joke in four or five really uninteresting variations, while Messrs. Levine and Lake did the same thing. Literally this one joke was probably tweeted at me 20 times.

It’s also really weird that someone from a background like Blumenthal’s would think living in Park Slope should be a source of shame for someone with left politics. I kept asking why it was okay for them, as alleged progressives and socialists, to live in nice places, and go to expensive schools (Lake went to NYU, Blumenthal to Penn), but it wasn’t ok for me to live in the same neighborhood as their fellow progressives Chris Hayes and Corey Robin, both of whom, I’m quite sure are doing a helluva lot better than I am. This just elicited more cringe-makingly stupid jokes about soy lattes, $900 strollers and, idiotically, the Park Slope food co-op, which is the closest thing to anarchist practice in the neighborhood.

Maybe I am missing something, but to me this is, in a weird way, a left-handed admission from these people that they are exactly what I have accused them of being all along: defenders of the state and the inequality it protects. Fellow Park Sloper Hayes, for instance,  defends the political system that makes the co-existence of Park Slope affluence and South Bronx poverty acceptable and intransigent. I have some of the advantages he has (though only a fraction), but since I more radically oppose that system, I’m somehow a bigger hypocrite. How, exactly, does this work?

The other thing that’s worrying is to see people like Blumenthal making common cause with bottom feeders like Levine in anarchist beatdowns. A schism between genuinely principled lefts, including principled liberals, and the dimwitted, partisan riff raff that increasingly dominates liberal discourse is inevitable. It would be sad for all concerned, if good people ended up on the wrong side.

——-

Related Reading

A Few Words on Jacobin and Purity Cults

Freddie DeBoer Smears Again

 

The Corey, Freddie and Erik Show

The Flame Robin, a small passerine bird native to Australia. h/t @thurnandtaxis

This is a supplement to my last post, mostly for entertainment purposes. Consider it a walking tour of the liberal waste dump if you will.

I mentioned that Corey Robin mischaracterized a detractor. This is what that detractor, Bleeding Heart Libertarians blogger, Jason Brennan, actually said that Robin described as a call for a ‘purge’:

[Replying to Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber, where Robin contributes]

“Chris, you should really consider kicking Robin off the blog. I’m not convinced that he’s not just pulling some sort of extended Sokal Hoax on the pseudo-intellectual Left.”

Let’s completely put aside the most important thing, which is that Brennan has absolutely zero influence over Crooked Timber, and simply consider his  remark, which seems to be a jab at Robin’s scholarship, not his ideology. As I am a huge fan of the Sokal Hoax, I think it’s a good one, too. Since it’s about integrity, not ideology,  it’s not a call for a purge, and that makes Robin’s mischaracterization — which Freddie DeBoer obligingly parroted —  a self-serving smear.

For a chuckle, bear this incident in mind and, in particular, recall the gravity with which DeBoer traced the lineage of Brennan’s remark to Nietzsche and  ’murderous despot Augusto Pinochet.’  Then read the first comment on another Corey Robin piece about Nietzsche at the liberal site, Crooked Timber:

I wonder if perhaps it is time for certain philosophers to be drummed out of polite society…Maybe it’s time to purge not only Nietzsche but also Strauss, Plato (the root cause) and possibly Hegel as well from the curriculum. Make it clear that these people and their views are evil and discredited…Plato, via Leo Strauss, caused the Iraq War…

Clearly the Crooked Timbers are not all about the epistemic whatsit the way libertarians are. Remember how they championed Erik Loomis’s academic freedom to say people he disagrees with should go to jail?

For more amusement, compare the snark, stonewalling and smears by which DeBoer and pals ‘defended’ his post on libertarians, with the civil, substantive, very heterodox discussion of Robin’s piece taking place between libertarians and lefts at the very site DeBoer cited as his bad example. Even by his own stupid yardstick, DeBoer is, once again, a loser.

Finally, it is with a great deal of schadenfreude, no, actually just freude, that I direct you to this post on Lawyer, Guns and Money, where our old pal, the aformentioned Stronzo di Tutti Stronzi, Erik Loomis — who intensely dislikes DeBoer for all the wrong reasons — unfairly implicates him in race science advocacy on his way to slamming Andrew Sullivan. DeBoer foolishly enters the fray and gets gleefully, meanly and unjustly skewered.

It’s terribly unfair but it’s undeniably delicious seeing DeBoer’s chosen comrades, the liberals, so wonderfully not anarchist nor libertarian, beating him senseless at his own smeary, dismissive game, mere hours after he’d keenly observed the ‘snarky dismissal and invective’ with which less evolved tribes discourage independence. He returned to his blog to complain:

I signed the petition insisting on Loomis’s academic and intellectual freedom. Today, despite his loud stand for his own academic freedom, he threatens my own.

To which Professor Loomis replied:

Ah poor Freddie, but it’s not like I didn’t warn him.

Authoritarianism advances when authoritarians advance…ensuring that an obvious authoritarian can keep his job and advance professionally toward greater influence must surely be a tactical draw at best from the standpoint of entrenching free speech as a social good.

Oh, liberals, please never change. We need the laughs.

Related Reading

Freddie DeBoer Smears Again

A Radical Look at Free Speech

On The Authoritarian Asshole Erik Loomis’s Free Speech Problems

Freddie DeBoer Smears Again

The way in which a kind of left discourse I call pop anti-libertarianism proliferates in direct relation to the abysmal shittiness of Obama’s presidency merits at least one full post on its own.  Suffice it to say that the huge, stenchful dump pop anti-libertarian Corey Robin recently took on the pages of The Nation,  just at the moment the flood of Democratic scandal reached eyeball level is, at the very least, highly symbolic.  Suffice it also to say that for leftier lefts wishing to sit at the Serious table, making a Robin-like ass of oneself on the topic of libertarians is highly advisable, particularly for those who can’t yet stoop to partisan apologetics. 

Those of us who see behind Freddie DeBoer’s handwringy earnestness an increasingly run-of-the mill, disingenuous liberal aren’t too surprised to see him jumping on the anti-libertarian bandwagon. Nor are we surprised that he took Robin’s widely-disparaged essay as his inspiration, where it functions as Robin normally does in pop anti-libertarianism:  as an ostensible scholarly foundation for breathtakingly stupid boilerplate smears, entirely unnecessary for anything but a facade of high-mindedness. DeBoer lingers on Robin only long enough to draw a smeary line between Hayek, Pinochet and Libertarians, and to parrot Robin’s smeary mischaracterization of a libertarian detractor.

After the familiar inventory of his own virtues – prolific and expansive reading;  open-mindedness; intellectual fearlessness; and eternal hope for, and openness to, alliances with his political inferiors — DeBoer unlocks the secret of libertarianism with his customary rigor, briefly considering one web site (Bleeding Heart Libertarians) and a handful of Facebook acquaintances.

Regular readers may recall that Freddie recently exposed the unworthiness of anarchists as allies via a single window-smasher he knew eight years ago. His study of one libertarian blog and some Facebook pages is no less fruitful, crucially revealing that libertarians are a bunch of school lunch-hating, sick-person killing, Pinochet admirers. Moreover, because of a uniquely ferocious proclivity for orthodox close-mindedness — ‘epistemic closure’ in Freddie-speak — it’s unlikely they will ever amount to much else.

Even if you accept Freddie’s idiotic premise that a perusal of one libertarian website and a handful of Facebook pages tells you all you need to know about libertarians, ‘epistemic closure’ seems rather an odd benchmark. Is it better, for instance, that liberals aren’t disciplined on anything except unconditionally supporting Democrats? To attempt to refute shit this arbitrary, sloppy, stupid and dishonest is to dignify and thereby encourage it. So I won’t.  Instead I will simply quote DeBoer himself, when the rhetorical project of smacking down the ‘bullshit social climber faux anti-racism‘ of African-American radio and video personality Jay Smooth necessitated this robust defense of libertarian Radley Balko:

Jay Smooth makes videos on the Internet. So he’s got that going for him. Radley Balko, meanwhile, has gotten actual black people out of actual jail. He has worked tirelessly against police abuse and corruption, the drug war, and mass incarceration, and specifically the mass incarceration of young black men. He’s been cited in court cases where innocent people were freed. His journalism– you know, the kind where you go out into the world and find out facts in order to create change, rather than sit in front of a webcam and use tired slang– has helped to create material change in the world.

Clearly, there are worse things than ‘epistemic closure.’ Like being smeary, sloppy, and unprincipled, for instance.

UPDATE

I’ve posted an amusing supplement to this piece: The Corey, Freddie and Erik Show

Related Reading

A Few Words on Jacobin and Purity Cults

If You Are Not A Libertarian, Why Are You Always Defending Them? (From the Rancid Honeytrap FAQ)

The Corey, Freddie and Erik Show

29% of All Voters Think Armed Revolution May Be Necessary.

Fairleigh Dickenson University recently conducted a poll of registered voters about the need for gun control laws.  The poll asked questions about armed revolution and Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. Findings: America is a weird country.

Regarding armed revolution:

• 29% of  all voters think an armed revolution in order to protect liberties may be necessary.
• 5% of all voters are unsure.
• 18% of Democrats think an armed revolution may be necessary.
• 44% of Republicans think an armed revolution may be necessary.
• 27% of independents think an armed revolution may be necessary.
• 38% of Americans who believe a revolution might be necessary support additional gun control legislation.
• 62% of those who don’t think a revolution might be necessary support additional gun control legislation.

Regarding Conspiracy Theories about Sandy Hook and attitudes toward gun control:

• 25% of Americans think that facts about the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary last year are being hidden.
• 11% are unsure.
• 32% of Republicans think the truth about Sandy Hook is being suppressed.
• 20% of Democrats think the truth about Sandy Hook is being suppressed.
• 31% of those with no more than a high school degree think the truth is being hidden.
• 16% of college grads think the truth is being hidden.
• 37% of Americans who think the public is being lied to about Sandy Hook support new gun control effort.
• 59% of Americans who don’t think there’s a Sandy Hook conspiracy support new gun control effort.

The rest:

• 50% of registered voters think new gun laws are needed.  
• 39% of registered voters don’t think new gun laws are needed.  
• 73% of Democrats say new gun laws are needed.
• 65% of Republicans don’t think new gun laws are needed.  

A Few Words on Jacobin and Purity Cults

I usually restrict my irritation with other small-time radicals to random jabs on Twitter and various asides in blog posts about bigger fish. However, there is a really annoying conversation developing in blog and Twitterland about ‘left purity cults’ and as it’s a conversation in which I am already publicly involved and as it’s a conversation that has so far been dominated by bad faith and general stupidity, I feel compelled to address it in long form, I hope,  for the last time.

It started with Freddie DeBoer, a lefty blogger who I briefly found interesting not least because of how he manages to be both really sharp and really clueless at the same time.  A big part of DeBoer’s meticulously cultivated personal brand is fierce intellectual independence. So it is never enough for DeBoer to simply provide supporting evidence for whatever axe he happens to be grinding. He must also demonstrate how grinding this axe sets him apart from less courageous, less principled people.

Recently, in the midst of endorsing another Jacobin call for More and Better Democrats, DeBoer conjured an army of unprincipled, petty Jacobin detractors apart from whom he bravely set himself.

That opinion, I’m afraid, is not very cool. Jacobin has been catching some of the expected flak lately, given their recent success. They are guilty of several of the Lefty Seven Deadly Sins, including Being Popular, Getting Positive Attention, and Convincing Others. This cannot be countenanced, and so they are being punished. Mostly by anarchist, by my lights, but by the general mass of the “however extreme you are, +1″ crowd.

Who these people are, DeBoer didn’t say. Nor did he link to anyone, no doubt because it’s hard to find people who say ‘I really don’t like Jacobin. They’re too popular and convincing.’  Proving the envious, purist essence of more common complaints that the Jacobin crowd is, say, too soft on liberals and too hard on anarchists is yeoman’s work. It gets in the way of a nice, concise advertisement for oneself. So no facts intruded. Instead, DeBoer went on a weird, irrelevant tangent about how much anarchists suck — rich white smashers of car windows, of course — perhaps in an attempt at brand synergy with anarcho-punchy Jacobin. Who the fuck knows?

This was too much, so I took him to task in comments, and what happened was, in retrospect, quite funny, with DeBoer taking comedic flights from self-awareness via the crudest demonizing and pathologizing. My personal favorite:

I’m going to tell you this because I genuinely like you and wish you the best: I’ve known people who act the way you do. They either killed themselves or became Republicans.

I would have been happy to let that be that, resolving to never be trolled  by Freddie again, were so many others not so bent on taking this substance-free, fallacious shit seriously. Shawn Gude, of Jacobin, called DeBoer’s mish-mash of straw men and smears an “intervention in the purity debate.” Then a day or so later comes Matt Bruenig, linking to DeBoer’s post with this,  ’The Death Spiral of Futile Leftism’ :

The left-left side of the blogosphere is chattering about lefter-than-thou sniping that is apparently aimed at people associated with the Jacobin. For readers who don’t pay attention to that stuff, Jacobin magazine is a socialist magazine that is popular. The lefter-than-thou crowd is comprised of people who do everything they can to throw bombs at left-wing projects that are successful. The goal of the bomb-throwing, it appears, is not to actually achieve anything substantive; rather, it is to make damn sure everyone knows they are different from them, those leftists who aren’t the real leftists like they are.

On and on like that it goes for not one but two posts. Which puts us at three-too-many posts about anti-Jacobin purity cults without a single example of an anti-Jacobin purity cultist, or the intrusion of a single left idea that purists might haggle over.

Lets just cut this stupid crap right now, ok? First of all, if you’re going to write multiple posts about this thing on the left causing ‘death spirals’, no one is obliged to take you for anything but a lazy dumbass if you are unable or unwilling to provide even one fucking example of this thing you’re talking about. Linking to some other dumbass who wrote about this thing also without providing an example really doesn’t count. It makes you look even more ridiculous. Collectively you just look like a clique closing ranks against criticism.

As to the complaint itself:  Yes, of course, there are purists. There are leftier than thous. Americans are religious people and it bleeds into everything. But very few differences among leftists are of this kind and there is zero evidence that people’s problems with Jacobin are all in some uniquely substance-free class. For me it’s a mix of the personal and political. I disagree with a lot of what members of the Jacobin crowd say and I especially don’t like the way some of them say it. There are too many certified creeps over there.

In any event, I am at pains to understand how taking radicals to task for being too radical is any more useful than taking people like Jacobin to task for not being radical enough. After all, what is the functional difference between a leftier-than-thou shithead and their more-pragmatic-than-thou analog. Certainly some of the by now greatly inflated animus toward Jacobin owes to their emphasis on how flawed everything and everyone else on the left is, particularly radicals who don’t share their religious faith in state power.  How does this differ functionally from people talking shit about them? If there’s too much friction, how are diatribes about purity cults relieving it?

If  leftists really do hate other leftists for ‘Being Popular, Getting Positive Attention, and Convincing Others’ aren’t there more worthy targets for purity cults than Jacobin? I mean, what about investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill? It’s only May and the guy has already won a literary prize of $150k, just released a hit book and has a movie coming out. He’s also very cute. If Jacobin’s 3000 subscribers and shout-outs from Chris Hayes make purity cultists foam at the mouth, shouldn’t Scahill’s far greater accolades, access and rewards make us apoplectic? But near as I can tell, almost everyone who cares about America’s criminal wars likes the guy.

Perhaps there are other variables.  Like that Scahill’s not a dick.

——————

UPDATE 3

The latest from Matt Bruenig: “If nothing else, inadvertently setting off the unhinged is great for pageviews.”

What a dumb man. Trading entirely in straw men and smears on behalf of moving us past sectarianism to solidarity. SMH.

For laughs, here’s Matt’s guide to knowing whether or not you’re dealing with a purity cult. Includes helpful 10-point checklist.

UPDATE 2

Matt Bruenig has facetiously asked me on Twitter when I am going to write something about what he actually wrote. He’s insisting that his piece has nothing to do with Jacobin per se, that DeBoer’s piece was just his ‘hook.’ Not sure that matters since it’s a substance free caricature of unnamed people regardless.

In any case, Jacobin chief Bhaskar Sunkara dropped by Bruenig’s blog to comment as if it were about Jacobin, so clearly I’m not the only one missing Bruenig’s point. A lot of his readers have missed the point too, and it’s quite funny to watch Matt — who, as we know, hates purism — trolling through the comments belittling and insulting people who express only the mildest misgivings about Jacobin.

Bruenig obviously thinks all the Twitter-love for his post denotes merits beyond its naked and simplistic appeal to tribalism and conformity. Haughtiness has ensued, as it so often does when the self-unaware get too much attention. With Corey Robin-like wit and self-effacement, he urged me to ‘Read  harder.’

I invited him to comment here but he has declined.

UPDATE 1

Freddie DeBoer has replied to my post and again I marvel at his ability to either miss a point or pretend to.

 Look, the most accurate criticism you can make about me is that I can’t disentangle my personal from my political. Many people find that solipsistic and annoying. But I know of no other way to keep the fire. If liking Jacobin makes me unacceptable to Tarzie or anybody, that’s how it goes. I have now had five years of people not liking me. I am used to it.

As an object study in tactical cluelessness, Freddie is clearly a very poor judge of what criticisms I can make about him. Surely it’s obvious to everyone but him that this post is not all about Freddie and that I truly don’t give a fuck how he feels about Jacobin.  I’ve introduced him here as an example of a certain shitty disciplinary smeariness and because his shitty, disciplinary smeariness is becoming contagious. My primary interest, perhaps foolish, is in killing this stupid, fake, self-serving ‘purity cult’ nonsense before it grows and to show the cringe-making hypocrisy of anti-sectarian sectarians. If Freddie’s only conclusion is that I dislike him, that’s fine, I do, though perhaps less than he thinks. But it’s really not my aim.

Recommended reading:

Keepers of the Gatekeepers

 

New Shills Rising at MSNBC, Including Party Hack/Bankster pal Karen Finney

Well, it’s been a busy few weeks for the MSNBC Human Resources Department. Poor old Ed Schultz has been demoted, probably because he looks, sounds and acts way too much like the people who still rule the world. The rubes who watch MSNBC have made it clear that they’re not entirely unhappy with the status quo, but they want it tastefully appointed with youngsters, women, light-skinned African-Americans, and queers.

So the fat, old, white dude has surrendered his regular evening spot to the slim, young, white dude — Chris Hayes — in exchange for an unenviable 5:00-7:00 slot on Saturdays and Sundays.  Hayes’ old weekend show, Up, goes to Steve Kornacki, an openly gay senior writer at Salon, previously a co-host of The Cycle, and easily Hayes’ peer in yappy bloodlessness. Mediagenic ‘analyst’, SOPA lobbyist, and cable industry errand boy, Ari Melber will take Kornacki’s vacant seat. Finally, analyst Karen Finney, a career Democrat and communications consultant, will helm a new weekend show created just for her.

It’s interesting that so soon after all the fuss about MSNBC’s relentless pre-election shilling, Finney’s lengthy career with the Democratic Party barely raises an eyebrow.  Her service to the Party began in the Clinton White House, continued in communication work for various political campaigns and culminated in a four-year stint as a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee. For MSNBC viewers — who dine on heady fare like whether Dear Leader’s visage should be carved into Mt. Rushmore and who troll the hapless Kornacki for saying ‘Obama’ instead of ‘President Obama’ — Finney’s long partisan resume is a feature, not a bug.

As I’ve said before, I don’t honestly care about the network’s more overtly partisan hacks, because the whole undertaking is so obviously a fraud. Marking some distinction between Finney and Melber, for instance, because Finney made her bones under official party auspices, while Melber merely lobbies against internet freedom, is part of the scam. Indeed, you could regard the increasingly blatant partisanship of MSNBC as something of a cover for the corporate and financial interests that dominate both parties and the media.  So it’s fitting that emerging star Finney has her hands in all of it, having parlayed her campaign skills into campaigning for corporate and financial interests.

As an African-American woman and a board member of the National Abortion Rights Action League, Finney embodies the mythically crucial difference between good oligarchy and bad. As a corporate consultant, she embodies the more obviously crucial similarity. In her online bios, she touts her work for the textbook company Scholastic as somehow indicative of a commitment to education, but not her work for clients like the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), Wall Street’s largest trade and lobbying group.

SIFMA made headlines a few years ago when a leaked internal memo revealed its aggressive campaign to counter the ‘lynch mob’ arising from a ‘populist overreaction’ to the financial crisis.  As Bloomberg reported at the time:

The meeting minutes and staff-written papers…outline the program crafted by polling, lobbying, and public relations companies paid at least $85,000 a month.

According to Bloomberg, leading recipients of the largesse included consultants from both sides of the political ‘divide’, including Michele Davis, a former employee of Henry Paulson and later a communications specialist for the Romney campaign; Conrad Belcher, a strategist and pollster for Obama’s 2008 campaign; and Republican strategist Conrad Black.

Karen Finney joined this collegially bipartisan collection of highly paid image renovators at least twice, once in 2010 and again last year, as a panelist at SIFMA’s annual meetings. Considering that her co-panelists included Black in 2010 and Belcher in 2012, there is no reason to assume that Finney’s participation ends with her speaking duties any more than it did for her co-panelists, though it would certainly be damning enough if it did.

An MSNBC ‘analyst’ such as Finney is essentially a part-time journalist, so standards about disclosure and speaking fees apply to her too. The Wall Street Journal forbids its journalists from accepting fees at all. The New York Times only allows it for talks at universities and for certain non-profits. Reuters only allows compensation for travel and accommodation. By any standard, compensated work for a large Wall Street lobbying group seems far beyond the pale. The reasons for this are obvious. Speaking fees are, at the very least,  bribes. That Finney got invited to SIFMA’s biggest annual event twice in three years demonstrates that she didn’t do anything to piss Wall Street off  in her role as an MSNBC analyst; or columnist for Politico, the Hill or Huffington Post; or as a political consultant. As a professional message manager with deep connections in government,  she may have done a whole lot to help.

Naturally I don’t expect anyone with any influence to take up the matter of an extremely well-connected journalist selling advice and possibly influence to lynch-mob afflicted banksters.  Almost all public lefts are still incorrigibly wedded to their tactical alliance with the DNC, and to careers reliant on swapping credibility with shinier, more corrupt enterprises. When I revealed Ari Melber’s connections to cable monopolists and SOPA, the only writers who took an on-the-record interest were two junior members of the Jacobin clique — Elias Isquith and Shawn Gude — who were concerned about my ‘bullying’ lack of ‘civility’ with regard to poor Melber, and who ridiculed me for calling the relationship between The Nation and MSNBC a ‘hack daisy chain.’  You would think someone like Vince Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights — an organization that allegedly opposes SOPA — would be inclined to raise questions about Melber’s day job. But instead, he did this: 

Other writers, including some fairly big names, expressed concerns about Melber off the record, but were unwilling to say or write anything about it. Melber and his Nation boss Katrina vanden Heuvel ignored repeated requests for comment. At the time I was disappointed. Now I think it’s for the best. It shows, beyond all doubt, how deep the rot goes. Occasional moments of courage and integrity only confuse things.

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UPDATE: Vince Warren has replied on Twitter to repeated requests for comments on Ari Melber’s SOPA lobbying:

Gotta wonder why someone would reply simply to evade the big question, and with no more than a mischaracterization of something else. I never said these people were ‘wedded to the DNC’; I said they were wedded to their tactical alliance with it. The clear implication to anyone reading (as opposed to name searching), was that this tactical alliance puts them on easy terms with MSNBC generally and sleazeballs like Ari Melber in particular.

Must be nice to have a career where missing the point of everything is a plus. I do, however, appreciate the implied concession to my point about careerism, though.

Read over this post from the MSNBC website, in which Warren and other civil libertarians helpfully offload Obama’s atrocious civil liberties record onto Congressional Republicans and his dedication to other pressing matters. I’d say Warren is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

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UPDATE 2: My pal Walter Glass has made an excellent comment regarding Finney’s work for Scholastic. Some opportunistic sleaze here, also, it seems. She’s a real winner.

Recommended reading:

The Cable News Heroism of Chris Hayes

A Real Shill: The Nation’s Ari Melber

The Fraudulent Dissent of Lawrence O’Donnell