From the start it has been clear to most of us on the Left that "No Labels" was cooked up as a Burkean cosplay fantasy camp where an entire menagerie of Beltway parasites and con men feast upon the credulity and cowardice of wealthy political shut-ins and weak-minded child-men who cannot face the fact that the GOP has gone mad, and a variety of "true Conservatives" who have been run out of the movement by the beast they created.
"How clear?" you ask.
Well five whole days after "No Labels" was bankrolled into existence in 2010, I wrote the following post which reads, in part...
Dead Center
Political Cowardice Now Has Its Own "Movement"!
Yay!
In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers (Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project" (Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...
...and David Fucking Brooks?
And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities)?
What you get crawling out of the Petri dish are things like the autotuned, content-free, sugar-coma-inducing horror that is the "No Labels Anthem"
But nothing we did not expect, right?
I mean, ever since the Republican Base ducked out on paying the tab for a generation of being loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything by putting on funny hats, screaming about liberty and calling themselves "The Tea Party", their sleazy Centrist enablers have been seething with jealously. Quite suddenly the monster they built didn't need them anymore and the skeevy hustlers who had helped create the Racist/Corporatist/Dominionist Confederacy on the bones of the New Deal and the grave of the American Dream found themselves cast out and looking for their next meal ticket.
Preferably a meal ticket under a banner that -- like "Tea Party -- wouldn't keep bringing up their horribly inconvenient past as the sleazy, enabling hustlers.
Hey, kids! I have an idea! Lets peel those the icky, damning labels off of everything and -- presto! -- there is magically no longer any difference between rat poison and apple sauce!
Can I haz my million dollars now?
...and which references a post I had written four years before that which reads, in part:
Progressive Radio arose because politicians like Alan Simpson were, for twenty years, perfectly content with looking the other way and harvesting the electoral fruits of the poison tree that their Conservative/Christopath/Racist Hate Radio, Hate TeeVee, Hate Satellite, Hate Cable and Hate Publishing so lavishly watered and fertilized.
Because the GOP was never concerned with the destruction of political comity…as long as it was working to their advantage.
As long as all of the screeching Orwellian hellfire was coming from the Right, they never said a fucking word.
But now, finally, after twenty years of unilateral disarmament, now that the Left has at last decided to fight back hard, suddenly old Republican loons like Simpson get all gooey for the glory days of cellulose collars, nickel candy bars, whale-bone corsets, heroic cavalry charges and a politics of gentle, ruffled fisticuffs followed by brandy, cigars and top-shelf hookers.
Suddenly it is “zealots on both sides” that have torn his beloved Temple down.
Well fuck you, Alan Simpson. Fuck you sideways for your bogus hand-wringing and crocodile tears...
Well, Progressive Radio may have taken a helluva beating between then and now and Liberal teevee is being dismembered right before our eyes, but a few of us vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left remain alive and typing every day.
And so today, +60 "No Labels" posts later, what glorious scene did my eyes behold but this...(from the Washington Post):
Trump accepts No Labels prize, as O’Malley calls him ‘racist,’ ‘fascist’
Bwahahahaha!
...
The bipartisan good government group No Labels thanked six presidential candidates Monday for taking its "Problem Solver Promise," commemorating the event with a New Hampshire event that none of the candidates attended in person. One seemed particularly distant from the Radisson in downtown Manchester: pledge-taker Donald Trump."We had no idea when we started out down this road how many candidates would make the Problem Solver Promise," said No Labels's co-chairman and former U.S. senator Joe Lieberman, a longtime Democrat from Connecticut who retired as an independent after losing his party's primary. "Today, six have! I'm glad we got six. We could have gotten zero."
...No Labels has adapted to the rise of Trump more smoothly than other political groups. No Labels co-chairman Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor and ambassador to China, has consistently given Trump a solid chance of winning the nomination of a fractured GOP.
...
It is surprisingly easy to "adapt" when you stand for absolutely nothing except expediently tacking with whatever wind is blowing out of David Brooks' ass on any given day.
Crossposted from driftglass' blog.
