Many, many moons ago (2002, to be exact), I read a book by a guy named David Brock called ‘Blinded By the Right.’ Brock made his career as a right-wing “investigative reporter.” (That means he wrote unprovable hit pieces for the right, smearing the left.) He also happens to be gay. According to him, many people used to ask him about working for the far right in view of their attitudes about gay men. Brock said he’d never had a problem. That makes sense to me.

For one thing, lots of these “conservative” guys are closeted gay men, or at least bi-sexual. Brock wrote about going to gay bars with prominent cons. It’s just a personal opinion, but I usually suspect that the outsized, over-the-top reactions of many prominent conservatives to homosexuality is to make the gay sex they, themselves, are having hotter. Forbidden sex is hotter sex. For another, the cons don’t care about anything other than trashing their opponent. If you write vicious articles that harm a lefty, you’re good. They can just…overlook everything else.

At one point, Brock was assigned to write a hit piece on Hillary. (The right launched a sustained attack against her the minute they realized she had a real chance of, and an interest in, being president one day.) For some reason, he wrote a balanced, fair piece. That was more than they could stand and he was out…and suddenly, the gay thing mattered. Go figure.

So, Brock went on a reputation clean-up campaign. He wrote his book, a kind of mea culpa and founded a media watchdog group called ‘Media Matters for America.’ Suddenly, he was embraced by the left. As long as he attacked right wingers, everything he had done TO the left would be overlooked. For some reason (no one knows) he left Media Matters rather abruptly in November of 2022.

For my part, I never really trusted the guy. He would have stayed on the right as long as the right would have him, given the chance. He only switched teams when he didn’t have any other choice. The right wasn’t hiring him, being a risk he might write something fair, so the left was his only option. That’s not seeing the light. It’s seeking a paycheck. It’s desperation, not “reform.”

Now we’re getting the same thing again with the ever loud-mouthed Michael Cohen. Cohen was Trump’s “fixer” and he seemed to enjoy the job – and the paycheck – very much. He worked for 45 for years, doing dirty deeds for the dumbass don. Then he got busted for tax evasion and campaign finance violations.

As he does with virtually everybody around him, Trump gave Cohen a kind of ‘ho hum’ attitude and let him dangle. THAT irritated Cohen who started singing like Lucille Bogan. (Literally.) Trump abandoned Cohen, who understood he was on his own and so sought to protect himself. Enter the reputation clean-up campaign, the mea culpa, and the turn-around attacks on the person HE used to do the attacking for – and still would be to this day had he not gotten caught.

But, there he is, on lefty shows saying nasty things about Trump. It’s been awhile since he brought any new information to the table. Prosecutors now know pretty much everything Cohen knows and it’s all coming out in a drip so all Cohen has left is to go on camera and call Trump names. (Yes, I’m aware I have, sometimes, called the Orange Moron, CheetoJesus, Donnie the Dumbass names, too. But nobody’s paying me to do it. It’s just my honest assessment of 45 based on the way he is and the things he does.)

I’ll tell you this: Cohen isn’t “reformed.” He’s an opportunist and I wish the left would just let him fade quietly (please…stfu!) into the background…

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OMG, have you heard? It’s outrageous. It’s outlandish. It’s unbelievable. It’s probably racist. A MAGA con country singer sang a…a…oh, I can barely say it…a SONG! The left is very unhappy about it but I imagine the left hasn’t taken the time to listen to the song – so I did it for you. (You’re welcome.)

It’s not a great song but it doesn’t suck. It takes up a couple of MAGA talking points and talks tough. You know, country music stuff. It would have come and gone without much notice had the left just let it go. But no. If it’s entertainment related, people are talking about the song. Apparently, they even argued about it on ‘The View.’

Look, Jason Aldean’s ‘Try That In A Small Town’ (Aldean didn’t write it) is a fictional vision of small town life. The right LOVES to paint the left as out-of-control lunatics hell-bent on civil disruption and then pretend that they (the right) are the arbiters and saviors of all things good. None of it is true, of course. That’s a picture right-wing media paints for the rank and file to make them feel good about all the harmful things they’re supporting. (It’s right up there with the ever-popular, “Secretly, you’re the smart ones” fluff…)

The left says it glorifies guns. His grand-daddy gave him a gun he hears you’re gonna try and take. ‘From my cold dead hands’ is his message (but not the actual words). Nothing new there. He also says much of the crime found in big cities isn’t found in small towns. Um…yeah, okay. Not really Earth-shattering. Aldean insists that people in small towns take care of each other but even THAT is a prettied-up view of small town life. Try living in a small town as a person the right vilifies. See how well they take care of you…

Okay, so if the song is just a re-hash of MAGA talking points, what’s the problem? Oh, the video was shot at a place where a lynching took place and it uses stock video shots of social unrest to try to prove it’s point. There IS social unrest in cities. That’s just low-hanging fruit. As to the lynching, it’s the south. If you can’t take photos of a place a lynching might have happened (or definitely did happen) in the south, you can’t take photos of the south.

Me: “I’ll tell you this: MOSTLY, I just wish people who don’t like the song would just do what they do with every OTHER song they don’t like: ignore it and wait until it goes away.”
You: “Um…didn’t YOU just write, like, five paragraphs about it?”
Me: “Damn, it!”