DRW50

This gave me a laugh, whether it was intended to or not:

As someone here (I think) mentioned a while back, Victoria used to tell people that the expensive artwork in her home was paid for by Joan Rivers. I remember when Behind the Music did a feature on Andy Gibb. Victoria was interviewed, talking about how she just couldn't stay with him anymore because of the drugs. She was in tears. It was upsetting to me at the time because it felt much more real than those canned pieces often do.

I wonder if all the people who went on and on about how Biden should never have hesitated about letting refugees in because only Tucker Carlson says bad things have read this. I doubt it.

Between that and Rob O'Neill saying the right needs to go out on the streets like the Taliban, they are out and proud with their fascism. Yet the media still does anything and everything they can to give them full power.

The Atlantic has become a complete sham, pushing the most blatant propaganda from warmongers like Peter Wehner (involved in some of the worst decisions of W's Middle East policy) and dumbass Caitlan Flanagan, who has a long track record of absolute garbage (including painting the 1/6 rioters as hillbillies, rather than the very rich GOP forces they generally were). That magazine has fallen so far.

Mark Warner is one of the Democrats who has hidden behind Joe Mahchin in killing various reforms. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them were the senators who supposedly were not thrilled about winning the majority this year. They all sat back and let Trump do anything he wanted - that was easier for them, meant they could spend more time chatting with GOP friends on Manchin's houseboat and touring the Sunday talk shows. With a Democrat in the White House, they have to show how "bipartisan" they are, and play into right wing hands.

I just feel like this happens over and over and over. I am reminded of when the GOP and the media created a crisis over ebola in 2014, and Obama/Democrats ended up paying the price even though they had done little wrong. I don't know if people are going to ever wake up, until it's too late.

Sonja is going to be one of the players on tonight's $100,000 Pyramid (ABC, 9 PM EST)

It's not a surprise how quickly the sociopathic and self-loathing Republicans who have destroyed this country fall behind their masters, but it's still pathetic: Biden's drop in approval ratings (7 points per the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll) is more of an example of how the middle also tend to fall for these games, and why Democrats will probably continue to be easily attacked and suffer in the eyes of the public. This thread sums it up:

More NYT propaganda:

I'd think there may have been some longer teams on ATWT or GL in the '50s or '60s.

In what may be a new low for pathetic behavior even for her, Maggie Haberman is reduced to quote tweeting Don Jr.

Lemay was a wonderful writer - 8 Years in Another World was truly engrossing - so since he was happy to take the spotlight, while Rauch was a less wordy figure (his grudge-holding and malice were rarely spoken of in his own voice), he is more likely to get the blame. I also think some of the blame comes from AW falling apart at the end of his tenure and never really recovering, although he and Rauch were probably something of an anomaly in terms of stability (there's a thread buried on here with a title like - "AW - longest transition ever?") I think the other problem is that many fans took his word as gospel, because so little footage of his era is available. What he said about the cast, especially Courtney, became fact. The most revealing anecdote about his biases is probably when he takes time to eviscerate Val Dufour for stealing the spotlight from Susan Sullivan by being too hammy in the confession scenes that he wrote to showcase her. Dufour had been fired, and those were his last scenes. Sullivan was one of the show's leading ladies, and had plenty of story ahead. Yet the thrust of the story is that he was selfish, in the wrong. I am sorry he never got to make much of an impact in daytime after that, and that his second headwriting run, which was excellent from the little we saw of it, was quickly ended. Speaking of his ATWT consulting, he had a TV Guide interview a year or two after his second consultancy (which had been around 1994 or 1995 I think). I mainly remember it for his criticizing ATWT for becoming too out of touch with reality - he said during his time there he pointed out to them that three different characters had private jets.

Bipartisan and media dogpiling that stretches on for months and into an election year will have some type of effect, not just on this issue but possibly on all Biden's plans - whether it just ends up going into the already likely losses or causes more, we'll have to see. It depends on whether the gutless people in the party who mostly exist based on whether or not NATO says mean things about us while taking our money hand over fist. This type of huffing and puffing tends to get reaction in the richer suburban districts which flipped due to Trump, and are starting to flip back in some cases (this one is a special case as there was a former Democrat on the ballot as a third party spoiler, so whether it's a harbinger, there's no way to know yet).

Sadly, it's not even just the media - it's also warmongers in the party (even though Menendez was heavily bailed out by Democratic leadership, especially in 2018). They will throw us all under the bus for the sake of "above it all" posturing and defense contractors.

I think they are going to simultaneously say don't bring them here and attack Biden for not helping them, and the press will nod along.

Zaid Jilani is another of the "populist" left whose main job is "owning the libs" and sniffing around for his latest forever friend on the far right (he wrote and then deleted a gushing profile saying Josh Hawley was the new Teddy Roosevelt). I wonder whenever I see nonsense like this if he knows the people he loves will never support refugees who do not have white skin, and he is just lying for money reasons, or if he really is deluded enough to not get it. We are going to see never-ending posturing from the monsters on the right about how Biden abandoned refugees but refugees should not come here. At least the likes of Cortes and Stephen Miller are honest about why. Jilani will give them cover at every turn.

They are very influential in the media, unfortunately, so this is the type of thing that is used beyond a right wing base.

If it's made into a partisan issue, as it has already been, then it's more likely to be a 50/50 issue. Everything, even wearing a mask, goes that way. That push poll put out by Politico is being used to "prove" 45% of the public wants to stay. MSNBC had a "Democrat" on who spent ages before and after Biden's speech screaming about how we need to go back and take the bases. I'm not sure this would go any differently. The GOP and the media gain a lot from making this go their way and they are already devoting 24/7 resources to making that happen.

I already said this in the media thread, but Politico is putting out push polls saying only 49% now support the pullout, so that will just further exacerbate the media propaganda. A lot of this is about people who will not accept the truth - yes, the evacuations should have been done better, but if this were Trump, who would have had Afghans mowed down in the street and spat on their graves, we would have been told it was fine, because he would have given a bombastic speech. It's the same reason some of these same ghouls love to go on about Jimmy Carter, who also tried to tell the truth. The right wing and their media sycophants just make things worse and worse, and more and more twisted and demoralizing. It's a struggle to not just completely give in to nihilism when I see so many hacks out there with their glycerin tears about refugees when they know that the GOP will never let 99% of those refugees in and they know that many of the politicians they would sell their children for, like DeSantis, Trump, Hawley, etc. have and will continue to keep refugees out. The pieces of [!@#$%^&*] who weep and wail about how America has lost its standing are at least more honest. They care about not getting to feel special. They care about getting less party invitations, and side eyes at the parties they are still invited to. They are too rich and out of touch to realize that any standing America ever had in the world - whatever that even was - was destroyed when Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, and W (another piece of [!@#$%^&*] that the media now lionizes), with a great assist from the same media flacks now wringing their hands, lied their way into "liberating" Iraq and spewed bile at the countries smart enough to not join them. No wonder so many people have left this country behind and will never look back. And I don't even want to imagine what is coming.

The media is absolutely desperate, carrying water and pushing multiple attacks on various fronts. "Liberal" MSNBC, featuring the shows of various warmongers, has this man on over and over to scream and scream, in-between reminding everyone that so many people talk to him and only he understands, go to his website and buy his book: Naturally, the Never Trump brigade who were extremist Republicans before being kicked out of the party for their failures, like Bill Kristol and Michael Steele, eat this up. And there's always more: It's a sad day when Saagar, a Tucker Carlson puppet, has a better take than 98% of the press. I saw Dave Weigel's tweet about the RNC removing their press release on supporting withdrawl, and he mentioned that was a popular position until this weekend. I wondered what he meant until I saw this: The media and the GOP will work nonstop until they manipulate the public into getting worked up about the pullout - real or performative outrage. It will become yet another 50/50 issue, and yet another issue that the media will claim the public supports them on. If nothing else I hope this is a wakeup call for those in the party who did not realize just what an enemy of the people the media has become and how they will do anything they can to hand 2022 and 2024 to the GOP. No amount of vacuous Sunday morning show interviews will change that. They need to be frozen out.

I think the public who are sucked in by the media and GOP talking points will fall in line against Biden (that and the dead end leftists who are eating up all the giddy propaganda from loathsome Snowden and Greenwald today), so it will likely be 50/50, like everything else these days. I do find the hypocrisy of Republicans suddenly pretending to care about "women and girls" enough to make me want to retch, but this type of phoniness is appealing to much of the country, along with shameless Andrea Mitchell forcing out tears oncamera. The people who have been desperate to find "proof" of Biden's failure will never let this go. The only thing to hope for is that in spite of not having money, media control, and control of a majority of state and federal courts and legislate maps, Democrats can manage to hold on for a narrow majority in 2022. Biden seems to be willing to play the long game and not care about what people say - he's lost too much in his life to stop and listen to the chattering classes. So I am going to just try to go by his example and ignore a lot of stuff and cut my Twitter intake even further down, alongside my just about nonexistent news viewing. The news industry in this country at this point can just go to hell as far as I'm concerned. It's done.