Fading Star - The Bulwark

The concept is/was good, but are they really helping? This center left person (moi) isn't so sure anymore that it is worth the price of admission

From Poker Face, the MAGA dog

The Bulwark is a news and opinion site created by a rare breed of Never Trump “Republicans¹” to counter the specific threat of Donald J Trump (DJT²). I discovered them and the site in the run up to the 2020 US Presidential election. At the time, I was a non-user of any of the newsletters on Substack, so this was my entry.

And frankly, they were really helpful to me, their positions on Trump, and the Trump administration were a breath of fresh air.

I had known some of the names, mainly Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol, from their evolving OpEds.

Sidebar: I knew Charlie was one of the Right Wing AM radio hosts, who was less hacky than say Rush Limbaugh, but not that far from him.

Alas, during the Trump Administration I was surprised to read a handful of OpEds in the NY Times by him that I actually agreed to.

I quickly found others under their masthead that were rational, not mouth- breathing, and I mashed the subscribe button, coughing up $100 a year.

And I liked what I heard - mostly. Here was a center-right group that seemed rational, and while we had differences, we were on the same side. Against Trump.

My Positions

It seems that I ought to put my politics on the table.

At one time I would have considered myself fairly liberal, far left, and wanting a lot more backstopping of the population, but I am also willing to pay for this via higher taxes.

Socially, I am super liberal (and I am still today) but I would describe myself as fiscally conservative. It is important to pay for what we want to use. I know when people say “Socially Liberal, but Fiscally Conservative” many (or most) people cringe, as that usually is the rallying cry of the small ‘L’ libertarians, but in my case, it means that I want us (as in the United States) to have a strong safety net, to support our citizens, and to acknowledge that this takes money, and we should fairly tax the wider population to fund this³.

Novel, I know, but it is extremely rare to really believe this.

With that in mind, now I will talk about why I am very likely to cancel my subscription.

The Bullshit Begins

While I appreciate Charlie Sykes, and Bill Krystal, I have found that I really resonate with their editor and staff member Jonathan V Last (JVL). I am a realist by nature, and to me that means that I look for how bad things can get, and then anything that exceeds that is a win. His perfect foil is Sarah Longwell, a political operator who runs “Longwell & Associates” who do a lot of voter research (aka focus groups), and also heads the Republican Accountability Project, and Republican Voters Against Trump, both organizations leading the charge to get Republican voters to not vote for Trump. She is an optimist and balances the negativity of JVL.

Add in Tim Miller, a political operator who worked on many campaigns, the last for Jeb! and it is a power trio that is well balanced.

There is Sonny Bunch, the media and movie pundit, Mona Charen, Cathy Young, and Joe Perticone (the DC correspondent).

Through the 2020 election, and the aftermath, TB was a breath of fresh air, and it was comforting that some voices from the other side of the aisle were not all horrible.

But about a year later some issues began arising.

The Trans issue is something that has animated the right, and this chaos has seeped into TB. The shitshow and bad faith arguments were flying, lead by (checks notes) Mona Charen. It started with the outrage around the trans woman (aka woman) Lia Thomas competing in swimming for Penn. The histrionics were over the top, exaggerated, and in general used to justify further bad takes about the sanctity of women’s sports⁴. Then Mona wrote several pieces where she takes shoddily researched papers on the age of transitioning to then advocate/agree with the right-wing trolls who have pivoted to trans issues as a way to club the left. It was poorly reasoned, and she never seems to write about these topics for the “Plus” side where they open the comments up so that we could argue her piss-poor takes.

That is not my only issue with Mona. Last summer (2022) as the January 6th commission were having their public hearings, she argued that while DJT did a lot of bad things, it would be worse for the country to actually charge and try him in a court of law. Something something “too damaging” to the body politic something something…

Are you fucking kidding me? We need to not charge that Cheeto colored, ferret wearing, stubby fingered shit gibbon because his base might get their jimmies in a bunch?

And her regular Friday podcast “Beg to Differ⁵” is a cesspool of muddle. They argue both sides, but it really focuses to her (the right) side, and even when they have a strong guest, the whole podcast sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. I gave up after a handful of episodes.

Cathy Young was brought onboard at the start of the war in Ukraine. She was born in the USSR, leaving to the west after the fall in the early 1990’s, she was a long time writer for the libertarian rag Reason magazine.

Early, I enjoyed her analyses of the conflict in Ukraine, her background was helpful. Alas, whenever she veered off that topic, she fell back to her resolute “whatboutism” ensuring that she torture the arguments to make both the left and right arguments seem equally ill advised. Again, like Mona, she almost never publishes to the Plus side, as that would mean comments, and she gets flensed⁶ whenever that happens.

Not long after she joined, she wrote a daily Morning Shots post for Sunday (thus extending the days, this is Charlie’s daily post) and they were milquetoast all the way. But the last one she did was memorable and shameful. It was immediately following the Dobbs ruling on Roe v. Wade, and the reports of a pregnant early teen (12 years old) who had to travel from Ohio (where there was a trigger law banning abortion) to Indiana (who didn’t have a Trigger Law, dafuq former Governor Pence?!?!?) to obtain an abortion. She used this post to say that this sounded fake, it was most likely messaging and a fake story.

She got filleted in the comments, hammered for her insensitivity, not reporting on the facts, and her both-sides-ism.

Turns out that it was a true story, the girl was a victim of rape, that did have to travel to Indiana to get an abortion, so I am certain that Cathy Young issued a mea culpa.

I’m kidding, it’s been radio silence, but Cathy never again posted a Morning Shots article.

Sonny Bunch is an angry human being. His takes on movies and streaming providers are fine, and I will occasionally listen to one of his podcasts about movies (although I am not a fan of the MCU or other comic book movies, and they seem to be his faves).

But, when he guests on The Next Level, or even rarer a Secret Pod on Friday, he is just a loud asshole. I get that he likes his gas stove, and his anger at regulations, but I will admit that I smiled when JVL mentioned in the massive heat wave that swept across Texas this summer, and Bunch’s house in Austin, the AC unit and the water heater being too close together, making the repair almost impossible, I bet that his disdain for building codes, code inspections and enforcement will get re-evaluated.

Just kidding, he’s still an ass railing about regulations.

At this point if he is a guest on a pod that I would otherwise listen to, I just exit it.

Will Saletan is their token liberal. Alas, I consider Saletan to be a lite-liberal. His Slate days were posts that were straddling the center line, with a lot of sympathies with some fairly extreme right-wing arguments. He of course couched this in “balance”.

To me, it was (and is) a lot like the old Hannity and Colmes show, where Alan Colmes was merely a foil for Hannity. It was cringe.

Sure, he often has a point, but he seems to be on the staff to give a safe counterbalance to the center-right proclivities of the rest of TB’s staff.

I will agree that his opus work to document the evolution of Lady G Lindsay Graham is impressive, but it really didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already surmise. If you were ensconced in the right-wing ecosystem, it is probably a better lesson.

Where this leaves me?

Increasingly, I cringe when I am read the articles. Sure, I get the JVL darkness, and embrace that. But the number of times that I shake my head, and subvocally tsk tsk the staff is increasing.

More importantly, as the Trump phenomenon is well into its 8th year (in Summer 2015 he came down the escalator in Trump Tower) their tone has shifted to looking forward to when normalcy returns, and they can become out and proud Republicans again.

In the same vein, they bitch and moan about the Democrats not being as effective in fighting the MAGA right wing asshats. What they really bemoan is that the Democrats seem unwilling, unable, or incapable of following their (the TB staff) prescription.

Pardon me, you spent fucking DECADES shitting on Democrats, hyping up culture war hot button issues, and now you want to tell us that you really think Gretchen Whitmer would be a preferable candidate to Biden and Harris?

That sums it up well me thinks.

I will have more to write on this in the future.

1. This distinction will be important later

2. side note: the urban dictionary tells us that DJT is short for “Designated Jizz Towel” - so that’s what his hair is used for…

3. This is where I really find a beef with the progressive left. They have lately adopted the bullshit that is “Modern Monetary Theory” that says fuck the debt, print it as much as needed, and then destroy it periodically to prevent wild inflation. If you want to see why this is bad, read about the latest troubles with Crypto Currencies. Yes, I do vote to increase taxes, assessments, and to support the local schools even though I do not have children. It is just the right thing to do, dammit.

4. As if they gave one iota of a fuck about any women’s sports prior to this

5. The only redeeming feature of this podcast is the theme, the opening bars from “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky

6. Flensing is the process of slicing off slabs of blubber from whale carcasses so that it could be rendered in the vats on the whaling ships. This seems appropriate in this case.