Matt Taibbi once again proves why he needed to go independent regarding his reporting. This article, like most, would never have passed the quasi-politburos that have sprouted up in establishment publications. He zeroed in on The New York Times’ ‘adults’ piece, where Gail Collins and Bret Stephens apparently praised Speaker Mike Johnson for eschewing the “MAGA” factions of the GOP to pass Ukraine aid, FISA renewal, and government funding.
On the conservative side of things, yes, Johnson’s actions made the case over the weekend to boot him. The problem is there’s no one else who would do better. Who would want the job is another issue. It’s one of those situations where I would agree to pull the trigger on this, but it’ll devolve into a circus that could hand a Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, the gavel.
The FISA reversal is one of Johnson’s most disappointing developments. He was dead-set against it but got a briefing from the spooks and then reversed course—it doesn’t get swampier than that. Taibbi also noted the correlating pieces in The New York Times that backed FISA, juxtaposing that with the “adults” piece, noting that it takes a special entitlement for one to call those with whom one disagrees children. However, one can make the case that Democrats make that argument with their silly positions, but he tied that to what he sees as this absurd notion of being an “adult” in the political world. To Taibbi, the adults in the room aren’t revolting a la Johnson to the conservative wing of the GOP base; they’re ingraining a new ethos of being against being on the public’s side and being woefully unaware that this supposed special club has been at the forefront on truly horrific policy decisions (via Racket News):
We’re creating a class of “adults” who believe it’s their patriotic duty to be above taking the public’s side. A nominal liberal in the Bush or Obama years could feel safe objecting to an intrusive state on behalf of, say, a converted Muslim like Brandon Mayfield. Mayfield was a veteran who’d never been to Spain, but was arrested after a faulty FBI fingerprint match linked him to a Madrid train bombing. Federal snoops used FISA to sneak undetected into Mayfield’s house and office repeatedly and take DNA swabs, nail clippings, and cigarette butts, even fiddle with his 12-year-old daughter’s computer. “I became very paranoid that someone was going into my room,” the girl said.
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The concept of “adults in the room” assumed central importance in the Trump years. After his election, citizens were assumed to be incapable of correct choices, so no more looking at things from the vantage point of little girls’ bedrooms. Adults must be allowed to keep us safe. Who are the “adults in the room”? The numbers are probably like Orwell calculated in 1984, with a political establishment led by the 1% (Orwell had it at 2%, calling them the Inner Party) and administered by a nomenklatura of educated loyalists comprising a little over 10% of the population (the “Outer Party”). The Inner and Outer Parties Orwell described as the brain and hands of the state, surrounded by childlike prole-deplorables who make up the remaining 85% of the populace.
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When James Mattis resigned as Trump’s Secretary of Defense six years ago, not-yet-Substacker Matt Yglesias seethed in Vox that this wasn’t the end for “adults in the room,” just the end of the myth that any ever existed. After all, “The only real grown-ups in American politics are in the Resistance,” and “the real grown-ups are the ones who’ve been outside the room trying to get him out of office.”
With Trump out, the dynamic is inverted: the only adults are those on the inside, working to keep the Beast out by any means necessary. The Times, CNN, the Washington Post (which slobbered over Johnson in a piece called “Mike Johnson showed courage and rose to history’s call on Ukraine”) and others just made it crystal clear that this dividing line is about sides and nothing else. While Russell Brand, RFK, Jimmy Dore, Dave Chappelle and countless others are pilloried as right-wing grifters, we’re defining as “adults in the room” everyone from Cheney to Michael Hayden to Bill Kristol to David Frum. The latter ten years ago invoked outrage from self-styled progressives everywhere with his amazing Orwellian defense of FISA…
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America’s “adults in the room” have been on a remarkable streak in the last twenty-odd years of not being right about really anything at all, including what policies to avoid (e.g. disastrous Mideast wars or inequality-accelerating bailouts) if you want to keep the public from flocking to someone like Donald Trump. Saying “Transparency is Bad” and “Surveillance is Good” and expecting people to salute your adultness is a particularly potent formula for losing audience, which these types unfortunately don’t tend to see as a problem…
…Why can’t people just agree with us adults? Well, no matter if they don’t. If they can get enough people like Johnson to turn, they can make disobedient blocs like the Freedom Caucus “irrelevant to the governance of the House of Representatives,” as the Times put it today. That’s the dream, isn’t it? Making the right voters irrelevant? Isn’t that what being “committed to democracy” means?
Forget the next speaker, Mike Johnson sucking, although he is, and the state of the 2024 race; it once again circles back to how there is a political class who hates us. Who has allies deep within the security state to ruin us, which ironically makes the case to produce more Donald Trump-like candidates? Voters, Left and Right, would likely want this system, this swamp, busted up, right? The problem is this side knows they can turn people on a dime and make them proper adults.
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