Er, is your argument really going to be that conservatives would never countenance an insurgent uprising against the party establishment? That's what Trumpism was, and before that, conservatives primaried a whole bunch of congressional Republicans from the right, with the result that the ones who survived the purge are now meek cucks who fall in line behind the will of the base. I'd almost call it a blueprint for what progressives need to do to the Democrats.

California House seats are nice and all, but WIN HUGE IN CALIFORNIA just seems like the same strategy that Hillary went with. Of course PSA style status-quo liberalism worked in California, CA and NY are ground zero for that ****.

Oh I can answer this one. In this case, Crooked Media employs some NeverTrump stooge who took a bunch of money from Facebook (an increasingly destructive political force) to spread a bunch of anti-Semitic **** in order to defame Facebook's critics.

So, I would throw the Crooked Media owners under the bus for being being entirely principle free and co-opted by big tech/capital interests, an entirely symbolic episode of *why* liberals fail time and again to beat back the worst influences in American political culture, or minimally having poor judgement hiring deplorables who do the poisonous subterfuge propaganda work that corrupts the American polity.

I don't want to throw liberals under the bus as a reflex but surely you agree if you say own a business, you are responsible for the people you hire, right? If Tim Miller sexually assaulted an intern, would you just be like "oh well, 7/8 in their campaigns to flip districts!" Probably not, right? Why are they not responsible then for propping up Tim Miller as your friendly neighborhood Republican chit chat buddy when he actually moonlights as some ****ing ghoul that exploits anti-Semitic sentiments to protect corporate oligarchs?

Your never going to get out of this garbage political culture if you don't hold your allies accountable for their ****ty behavior. Be mindful not to fall for right-wing concern trolling traps but this one seems like not that, in fact seems like a pretty open-and-shut case of "prominent liberals invite garbage Republicans on to be their buddys to present themselves as broad-minded non-partisans, which right-wingers exploit, and launder their ghoul stuff for mainstream credibility," and it's not clear why PSA does this aside from "oh I had no idea a Republican operative would do racism for money, incredible" raised by wolves shtick reasons.

You are not going to find a professional Republican who does not do racism ghoul **** because the entire movement is only animated by racism ghoul ****, it's like trying to find a prude porn star, it's a contradiction from the start, so if you insist on caping for Republican operatives and inviting them on your show to be your beer drinking iconoclast friend, you are by necessity bringing on someone who is paid to rile up racist idiots with racism, there is no one with literally any political savvy who can credibly deny this, so yeah I mean I think these PSA dudes have something to answer for here.

Maybe, AT BEST, they are in fact figuratively raised by wolves and just that naive, which sort of undermines their brand as savvy political commentators, turns out maybe they're ****ing dip ****s, literally 95% of 2p2ers INCLUDING the hapless deplorables would probably bet on "yeah actually I bet Tim Miller's professional obligations involve a ****ton of racist propaganda," so I think the best I can interpretation I can have for the Crooked Media guys is that they are somehow even less discerning than the average dumbass here.

Not sure if it's been posted yet but the Dollop recently did an episode on John McCain. It's amazing how the Maverick attitude the media likes to play up has overshadowed his actual deplorableness - I knew he was bad but really didn't realize he was such an utter piece of ****.

That may be your worst post Dvaut. But it again raises the issue of why liberals throw their own under the bus. BTW, I don't believe Miller is an employee of Crooked Media. He would come on like once every few months to do a bit from the perspective of a never Trumper, and he's pretty funny. They likely met him doing comm stuff in DC and he was funny and fine at work functions/parties. He's now suspended from doing the occasional little bit on the show. Does this nothing episode eclipse the tens of millions of dollars, media exposure, and activism Crooked has helped generate for progressive causes and candidates? Your post is just dumb. Don't defend yourself, admit you are wrong.

It's not an either/or. People can do both good and bad things. It's good to raise money and exposure for progressive candidates. It's bad to give exposure to people who trade in anti-Semitism. What's so hard about that? Is Crooked Media responsible for amplifying Tim Miller or not? The answer is they are. Is Tim Miller a garbage GOP operative? Yes, according to recent NYT reports, he is. Are Crooked Media owners, the PSA guys, are they politically savvy enough to understand that the Republican friends they joke around with at parties in fact profit from anti-Semitic propaganda? They should be! Seems like a strange brand these guys are working here, sharp political analysts now off on a vision quest to get to the bottom of whether or not GOP operatives have no professional or personal ethics despite being fun at parties. The answer everyone else already knew: yeah they are bad people, amplifying them is bad, stop doing it.

And here's why they make the mistake: not because their critics reflexively throw liberals under the bus, but because liberals and professional Democrats like the PSA guys are the ones with a reflex to launder right wing trash for polite public consumption in the name of some bi-partisan norm valued only by a small cadre of professional Democrats and really like no one else.

Well, lost a reply post. Suffice to say it's unclear whether Miller even read the Soros information. He works for the company that issued the report. Here's what Miller recently had to say about Soros. Miller must be a truly vile person to hide his hate by defending the object of his emnity.


https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/statu...938554885?s=19

I'm starting to think Tim Miller might be a principle free person who will do anything for money.

Inghram is apparently too Nazi for AM radio advertisers. Not good when you’ve lost the Goldline.com crowd.

It is kind of unhealthy to identify Crooked Media as "your own" here. They're a media business. You don't necessarily need to worry about their ideological purity if that's not important to you, but you *certainly* shouldn't feel any political loyalty to them. They use your political engagement to sell podcasts and HBO specials. They're not on your team.

Google tells me Ingraham has a law degree (and worked at Skadden!); she’s gotta be like -300 to be a federal judge within 12 months.

This does not help your crusade to have us understand and respect the Tim Millers of the world.

Listening to this now and it's pretty fasincating. Seems like a slam dunk case from the start so I didn't think it would be that interesting but the campaign he undergoes to discredit the media and his own DOJ is almost the exact same playbook that Trump is running now. The parallels between how everything is playing out now versus the Nixon / Agnew era is terrifying.

The other thing hiring guys like Miller does is it normalizes pre-Trump Republicans. There's already enough of that going on with people like James Comey and Michael Hayden periodically being lauded by the left for speaking out against Trump while simultaneously getting former enemies to forget about how terrible they were when they were working for the government.

Seemed to me that PSA basically went, "We need to do what CNN does and find a token Republican to not have an echo chamber. Well this guy is a never Trumper. Let's hire him. He's one of the good ones." If it was naivety and incompetence, they wouldn't be defending his hiring. They'd own up to the mistake and fire his ass.

Right. It's a pretty rotted mindset.

And it's suggestive of how the Trump era, should we survive it, people are going to redeem the Republican Party to try to preserve the status quo. If Trumpism flames out, everyone on the right will pivot to some sort of NeverTrump pose, or NeverTrump Adjacent pose, and then integrate themselves with the mainstream media and return back to right wing orthodoxy. They know a lot of this **** is pretty deeply unpopular, so they're going to just rebrand the product. This is more or less exactly how the late 90s/2000s went where people had soured on the ghoulish aspects of Reaganism but the Bush era party rebranded as 'compassionate' while changing literally nothing. 75% of the Trump Admin themselves are going to try to point to their habitual leaking of embarrassing information about Trump to lionize themselves as Resistance saviors from the inside.

As I said, we need to be very, very on guard for how much of this phenomenon is simply people being duped by this act, versus how much their naivete itself is a pose to deflect blame from the outcome they want. That is, how many of these media people are just hapless fops for right-wing bad faith versus how many are aware and want a vibrant debate with right-wingers BECAUSE they want right-winger viewpoints aired, but just don't want to dirty their hands over it.

Not to let facts intrude, but Miller isn't an employee of Crooked Media. He was, I believe, a "Friend of the Pod". Now he's something like a former friend of the pod. There were no right-wing viewpoints expressed. It wasn't a CNN "both sides" panel. He occasionally came on to criticize Trump in humorous ways.

Listen, I know Republicans are bad, even never Trumpers, but accurate facts are often useful in the analysis of situations.

He was a "contributor." I would have to assume he wasn't contributing for free.

But Miller is no friend to anybody with a moral conscience.

He should have been gone yesterday and the PSA crew should have apologized for their oversight. Instead they're trying to sweep it under the rug and wait for their fans to move onto some other rage. Taking them off "until they can figure out the extent of his involvement" is damage control. He was the head of the group ffs.

He wrote articles for their website and (I believe) appeared on their podcast. Not sure why you drawing a distinction without a difference.

Why are you going so hard in the paint for them and him anyway? He's clearly an anti-Semitic, racist, piece of ****.

He doesn't care about Miller, he cares that you would (rightfully, understandably) start to question the credibility of the PSA bros for having some anti-semitic ghoul who tells Soros scare stories to deplorables for Facebook money as their Republican funny-man.

You might then make the next logical leap, which is what else are the rest of these guys selling and at what cost, what friends they keep, who else they regularly fraternize with, what else they amplify, etc.

Then you might grow disenchanted with the PSA guys.

Which is what simplicitus types do not want.

Im working out the kinks

I'm not a podcast guy, but I tried to listen to PSA last year after hearing about it everywhere. The guest was some focus group dude who was working with Obama-Trump voters. Absolutely unlistenable and depressing. Do not get.

Lovett's pretty funny. I listen to his podcast every couple weeks. Haven't listened to an actual PSA in a while.

They're doubling down

From Tim Miller:

Just the dumbest Raised By Wolves act. "Oh I just sent some background to reporters about Soros funding my clients' critics, that's literally all that was done on this issue" like he doesn't have the slightest ****ing clue what he was trying to do or what effect he would have.

The "Regardless of whether you think it’s a good or bad thing, this funding is potential news for a reporter" is the biggest ****ing tell. Like oh man, my agency in this, who knows, could be good or bad, what could I do? The Rules of Reporter Relevancy insisted I connect the dots to Soros, sorry thems the breaks, too bad the rules made me do it, whether you like it or not.

He goes on:

Just the dumbest of centrist liberal customer service: "I am deeply sensitive and resoundingly criticize the conspiracies and smears I propagated and amplified"

These people will take every last dollar and spread the worst toxins into the political system then try to soothe everyone that they understand why that is very irresponsible and they are sorry for your offense and all those dead people in the synagogues. They will never take accountability, they'll just run interference ("look all I did was scour the internet for vague connections between the villain in right-wing fairy tales about Jews and sent them to reporters on background in the hopes I could launder my anti-semitic smears through them and to an audience of angry anti-semitic morons who would rise up in defense of my client, THAT'S IT") then issue some hand-waving ghoul **** about how it's too bad our culture is flooded with violent anti-semitic propaganda, a real shame, they say.

By the way, surprisingly few people have mentioned Tim Miller's role in PR nonsense again ACORN, which like (((SOROS))) fairy tales was another utter bull**** right-wing nonsense propaganda campaign to shut down a good organization:

https://www.propublica.org/article/r...mum-wage-group

Great friends the PSA bros keep there.

WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES DO THIS KIND OF THING THOUGH?

Tim Miller and the Pod Save America crew is deeply upset minimum wage isn't higher and voter engagement is so low, they have been vocal critics of vote suppression tactics but it is relevant for reporters to know ACORN registers black people to vote and it's too bad there's so much right-wing bull**** voter suppression tactics, really sad even, also Tim Miller is funny and does not like Drump's tweets, like and share the pod.