Irked by Charlie Sykes’ Friday column in The New York Times—“If Liberals Hate Him, Then Trump Must Be Doing Something Right,” Driftglass writes—Today In Wholesale Thievery: Charlie Sykes:
Here is something you should know about a man named Charlie Sykes, who is now a Respected MSNBC Contributor and semi-regular New York Times columnist.
For many, many years Mr. Sykes made a very fine living as Wisconsin's own, locally-sourced, shit-house-to-table version of Rush Limbaugh. In other words, Mr. Sykes made his daily bread, and his monthly mortgage, and his boat payments and paid for his kids' college by gleefully slandering people like you and me…
..while we labored in the wilderness living off tip jars and part-time gigs, struggling against overwhelming odds to warn people that the world Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter and Charlie Sykes was shaping would be a complete, existential catastrophe for this country.
Not merely because their policies were horrendous -- because Team Evil doesn't really have anything that any same person could call a "policy" at all -- but because they were methodically and deliberately working around the clock to turn their already-deeply-ignorant and often racist Fox News/Hate Radio Conservative audiences into completely brainwashed, completely re-programmable meatbags whose opinions could be flipped on and off like a light-switch depending on the whims of people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter and Charlie Sykes.
You and I could see that future Orwellian dystopia coming from a distance of several decades and spent our precious time and meager, borrowed and patched-together resources to try to stand athwart the coming disaster and yell "Stop" at anyone who would listen. [...]
And now that the hellscape we warned them about for decades has finally arrived?
Well,, that just so happens to circle us right back to Mr. Charlie Sykes who, like so many of his Conservative media confederates that were finally cast out of the Conservative freak-show they created, have found an equally rewarding second career just plain ripping off the very Liberals who Mr. Charlie Sykes spent his first career mocking and demonizing.
Think I'm kidding?
I am not kidding. [...]
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- ‘See, I picked someone from the other party.’ That’s how we got Comey and President Andrew Johnson, by Ian Reifowitz
- Employers to drop 7 million people from healthcare insurance under Trumpcare, by David Akadjian
- What do bullets really do to bodies? Changing the conversation on gun violence, by Kelly Macias
- Comey’s firing demonstrates Trump presidency is exhausting—but we persist, by Sher Watts Spooner
- A Mother’s Day tribute to moms who buried their children due to police and gun violence, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Soup Sandwich, by Mark E Andersen
- NASA’s planetary science budget may have room to take us to a strange and exotic world, by DarkSyde
- Race and education make a bigger difference in who you vote for than ever before, by David Jarman
- Progressives blowing 2018 with too many resources relegated to Russia, by Egberto Willies
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QUOTATION
“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
~Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Did Hayden Break The Law?
Today, the President pushed for a quick confirmation of his nominee for CIA Director, General Michael Hayden. Various Senators have already come out and rubber-stamped the President's choice. I must admit, this rush to judgment seems paradoxical since program after program is being exposed that should stall--if not kill--the General's nomination.
First, it was the "terrorist surveillance program" that was represented by Hayden as being limited in nature. We still don't know who initiated the program. Reports suggest that it may have been Hayden who unilaterally implemented the extrajudicial spying program, before executive authorization.
Now, we learn that Hayden was the architect of a much broader program, one that has cataloged billions of calls made by innocent Americans.
While Hayden's supporters shrug off this massive data collection, they ignore a critical question: did Hayden break the law? And if so, how can they overlook that and vote for his confirmation?
The fact is that, depending on the exact contours of the program, this program may have already been banned by Congress. And if so, Hayden's resurrection of that program should cast the death blow to any nomination.