Given Jen Rubin finally quit the WashPost -- to start a blog called "The Contrarian" with @NormEisen, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, totally known for contrarianism -- here's my absolute favorite TV clip from the Queen of Partisan Dreck:👑pic.twitter.com/s4QtI1mHnd
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 13, 2025
January 13, 2025
Glenn Greenwald waves a cranky goodbye to Jennifer Rubin.
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“The Contrarian” is an odd name for writings from someone who was consistently in lockstep with the progressive left over the past five years. Made me laugh.
Not knowing who Glen Greenwald or Jenn Rubin are is evidence I get it right sometimes…
No one has spewed more partisan bile than Jennifer Rubin over the last four years. Norm Eisen is one of the chief Lawfare dudes. I suppose calling their venture "The Contrarian" is a better marketing approach than calling it something more accurate, like, say, "The Spew" or perhaps "Hinge-Free Cringe."
She'll be a hit with the Soviet Karens. That school marm whiny voice is so... delightful./
If a liberal who pretends to be a conservative to grease the wheels for a niche "house conservative" job in media, only to use it to score cheap independence points by criticizing conservatives and siding with liberals on every issue can be called a contrarian, then yes, Jennifer Rubin is a contrarian.
"Queen of Partisan dreck"
LOL.
Norm Eisen is the one so committed to LawFare that he actually attended several of the trials as a 'spectator' just to make sure the script was being followed.
I’ve been watching O’Reilly’s YouTube “No Spin News” channel, and I like him.
Lock her up!
He was "me too'd" out of a job. He does a short radio spot on Salem, I believe. I never cared for him very much. Too much me me me and not enough listening to the person he interviews. I can't stand guys like that. Hannity is now the reigning bad interviewer. He gives 5 minutes of Hannity rant then gives the interviewee 30 seconds to reply. Can't stand either one of them.
Glenn Greenwalk on the other hand has a lot of good insights. He's worth listening to.
How did creeps like Jen Rubin keep their jobs for as long as they managed?
One nice thing about the coming four years going to be the pushback on the DEI oligarchy broadly.
Jennifer Rubin looks like Alan Greenspan in drag.
You'd think after getting your panties in a wad about somebody saying "lock her up," you would be outraged when the next administration starts actively trying to lock up their political opponent. Not once but four times! In an election year!
Bad rhetoric against us? Outrageous! The worst ever!
Bad actions by us? It's fine. We should do more of that!
"cranky" ??
Starting a blog is harder than it sounds.
Hopefully she's nice to her cats.
Peachy said...
“She'll be a hit with the Soviet Karens.”
She should call her new blog the CCCP: Crazy Contrarian Columnist and Pseudo-conservative.
Sorry to disappoint those not in the know, but Rubin has reproduced spawn. Two of them.
Glenn Greenwald ain't perfect, but he's often interesting. Rubin should title her substack "Predictable Bromides."
She hasn’t been a conservative for years. I am surprised Bezos didn’t fire her. And you know she’s not a conservative based on who she has ended up collaborating with on her new venture. I will put it in the same category as The Dispatch and The Bulwark. All these people are totally Trump Derangement Syndrome people, and they can’t get over it.
Because if you can be trusted to always say what those in power want you to say, no matter how ridiculous... Well, just look at Gail Collins. How does she keep her perch in the media firmament?
The problem with Rubin and Brooks and French is that the liberal media gets to decide who is the voice of the conservative side. Good riddance to Rubin. Wish Brooks and French and Will would join her in the wilderness. No one is going to read her shit. Liberals don’t really care and real conservatives hate her.
Mental illness is a terrible thing.
Now that a few brave souls have left the hive and set out into the blogosphere, and done quite well for themselves financially, now the second-tier bottomfeeders are getting brave. Maybe they've been told privately that their time's up, or their home rags are in danger of folding the tent. Now, the marketplace has been proving that there's plenty of room for quality journalism. But I think the marketplace is also going to prove that for hack party-line journalists, the market is limited.
Those two have nothing to fear from MAGA, but if we were as bad as they say, they'd certainly be in the very first cohort of those I would nominate to be dragged before the tribunals after the Counter-Revolution.
Jen Rubin is dumber than a sack of hammers.
Ah yes "conservative" Jen Rubin. The woman who supported Hillary, Biden, and Harris for POTUS. And wanted the Democrats to control congress. Its fitting that her blog will be called "The Contrarian" when it will the opposite "The Conventional Wisdom".
Like David Frum or Bill Kristol, she always has some billionaire who's willing to give her a job, no matter how badly she does it, or how few people care about her.
Glenn is right. The same jerks who demanded Substack censor its writers are flocking to it. Heck, just a couple hundred subscriptions and you can squeak by,and these people are getting thousands of readers. Anyways, I'm glad people like Paul Krugman and even Jennifer Rubin can earn a living over there. But it's kind of crappy that these same people were criticizing Substack because it wouldn't stop its writers from trashing legacy media.
She loved Mitt Romney and John McCain. Loving Neocon war hawks was the extent of her so-called "conservatism". Once she decided that Biden, Harris, and HIllary were just as hawkish, she switched sides. The Greenwald clip is hilarious. I can honestly say she was a great mediocrity even as a Never-Trumper.
O/T: Jordan Petersen agrees with Althouse about Men in Shorts.
Her type are very useful--market yourself as a conservative who will spend most of your time attacking Republicans--that's catnip to liberal outlets that want to pretend to be unbiased.
"The Republicans are so awful that even conservatives have nothing good to say about them. Obviously, our constant attacks on them don't mean we're left-wing."
Jen Rubin, David Brooks, etc. are a cancer on our informational environment.
Once you see it, it can’t be unseen.
I've often wondered if lefties believe people like Rubin are really conservative.
"Not knowing who Glen Greenwald or Jenn Rubin are is evidence I get it right sometimes…"
Or maybe you're just forgetful.
What was so dishonest about Kristol, Rubin, French, Goldberg, etc. etc. is they would tell us in 2008 and 2012 that we couldn't have "purity tests" that the only thing that mattered was beating those damn Democrats and stopping the Left, and lets all jump aboard the McCain/Romney train.
Now, they're all leftwing Democrats. And rooted for Harris, the most radical POTUS candidate in my lifetime. This isn't TDS, this is deeply rooted dishonesty.
You know, it is appalling to me to realize that I voted for both of those shit-sucking assholes. I hope I don't end up feeling the same way about Trump.
BTW, its interesting that almost every top aide from McCain's 2008 campaign turned out to be a liberal Democrat. And the same is true of his wife. No doubt the same is true of Mitt Romney. I guess I explains Jen Rubin's love for them.
I agree, in part, with what Elon Musk said when he said "we are the news now". Everyone has a phone with a relatively very high quality video camera in it complete even with editing apps etc. That plus community notes and the rapidity with which info can be disseminated and cross-checked essentially means the Rubins, Frenches, Maddows, and Scarboroughs of the world plus hundreds like them are going to go extinct. Will it look like extinction where they just disappear? No. But they will get further and further boxed into smaller and smaller echo-chambers and an exponentially fewer number of people care about they have to say. They're liars and technology coupled with a huge cohort of what amount to citizen-journalists means they can't get away with it any longer.
They're going to start podcasts and substacks and profiles on bluesky only to realize no one but their liar friends are paying attention, then they will have to get more inflammatory to receive any attention at all, which will eventually lead to dead air.
These people are frauds, and in the long run it's really hard for fraudsters to be successful.
O'Reilly was remarkably patient with her. I suspect he realized that he was playing a small but important part in a video that would become a classic.
“The Contrarian.” The new publication will be on Substack and cost subscribers $7 per month for full access to its content.
That's tree fiddy each.
She’s a prefect example of over educated shrews that actually believe they are smart because they talk nonsense real fast. The only way to survive their tirades is to refuse to engage at all.
And now we hear that Chuck Todd will no longer be on NBC after his contract expires this year! The poor subjects of Partisan Dreck, losing their King and Queen in the same year. What next, the Goddess of Smug herself, Rachel Maddow? Gotterdammerung that Trump!
Not a good sign when the WaPo is becoming too wishy-washy even for the "never Trump" Republican types. Last one out, turn off the lights.
To call her new venture "the Contrarian" is a bit tone deaf. She is a predictable voice for the Dem woke-i-doke establishment in DC, running neck-and-neck with Jonathan Capehart and Ruth Marcus for the most out-there voice at WaPo. For a more aptly named exercise in calling out under-dressed emperors, try the Manhattan Contrarian, a blog written by a friend (and college classmate). He skips the rhetoric and in lawyerly fashion lays out the facts demolishing the latest craziness on offer from lefty-land.
I predict she'll make plenty of money with her "independent" blog. There's a strong market for her brand of "contrariness".
Tim Maguire wins this one.
We'll see the truth when Bezos fills the vacancy.
Who will they get to fill her column? Karen Pence?
I'm sure Kakastocrates is taking out a 2nd mortgage as we speak. Gotta support the team!
My favorite thing about Rubin is the weird, scowling self-portrait that hangs behind her in her TV appearances, It's like the Portrait of Dorian Gray, as painted by a special needs child.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/11/23/23/92417255-14118763-Washington_Post_columnist_Jennifer_Rubin_is_being_ridiculed_for_-m-11_1732404997409.jpg
A monkey with a typewriter could do it.
For a very long time, the 'Power of the Press' has really been all about the power to manage and control the physical distribution of the printed page. That's been in a long fade with the advent of the digital age, and the progress of handheld devices.
You mean waking up and realizing that your side are losers, and nobody is buying what you are selling anymore except the bubble people??
She's was all "let's you and him fight" when people were resigning from the other papers which didn't bend the knee to Harris. Never lifted a finger otherwise.
She jumped before she was shoved out.
According to Ace and a growing chorus in the few hours, it sounds increasingly plausible she was "shoved out". The old you can't fire me I quit! play.
In the previous thread about Ethical Judgments and Harm, I said "These people, and there are lots of them, essentially remain teenagers forever..."
Rubin not only acts like a perpetual adolescent, she's got adolescent taste too.
Althouse saved my time quite often by noting early in her posts that the subject was culled from a Rubin article. Talk about seiving the fines from the dross!
I can remember when she was supposedly a conservative.
I think what a lot of us miss about all these apostate conservatives, ex-Republicans, and ex-Trumpers like Ruben is that they're not really out there to expound their views because very few read her stuff anyhow. No, they exist to be clickbait for the conservative media to mine for regular servings of outrage porn for them to comment on. That's their business model. Like The View, Olberman, and that ilk do.
Link
Please update your NewSpeak dictionary, comrade
Humiliatingly, I did worse. I walked neighborhoods and knocked on a lot of doors for both of those shit-sucking assholes, and donated money to both of them too. My greatest political regrets...
I still don't understand how I got so bamboozled by those shit-sucking assholes. I'm a Libertarian, not a Republican. I don't know how the hell I ever convinced myself that either of them would differ in any meaningful way from Obama, if not do even worse as a traitor inside the gates.
"Contrarian" as to mean "contrary to Trump administration", not intended to indicate any contradiction to lockstep conformity to mainstream progressive-liberal talking points.
Agreed on thread winner comment from T Maquire
"Her type are very useful--market yourself as a conservative who will spend most of your time attacking Republicans--that's catnip to liberal outlets that want to pretend to be unbiased."
That right there!
hahaha!
If the Grauniad can afford to pay its loonies, then no doubt there's enough deranged coin around to keep Jen in cat food.
It's a long lost cause I can never win
For the civilized world accepts as unforgivable sin
Any disagreement with any Contrarian
Such as Jennifer the Contrarian.
A more appropriate name would be Licking The Taint Of Power
I finally managed to get more than one minute into this abomination. Would a feminist like Althouse be offended if I used the word "ditzy." You know what, I don't care. Ditzy.
She and David Brooks are what a lefty extremist views as a "proper" conservative, i.e., suitably deferential that they are even allowed to have a place at the grown-ups' table.
"Liar" is punchier.
This is the problem. Leftists demand the media only cater to far left sympathies. No matter how many lies are told to keep them on the hook.
AI could, with minimal prompts, outdo Jen. But AI is likely to have too great an ethical sense to do so.
I used to think she was just another run of the mill grifter like Charlie Sykes and Morning Joe but after watching that, I’m open to the idea that she’s actually mentally ill.
My theory is that if you look hard enough you can find a basis for calling ANY position Republican/Conservative or Democrat/Liberal:
In the '60's when I was a young grown-up and trying to understand policy and politics, the BIG ISSUES were War and Civil Rights. The Left was Against War and For Civil Rights.
Yet, it was several Liberal Democrat Presidents who started and expanded US involvement in the Viet Nam War, but eventually a Republican President who got us out of it. So which was the War Party?
On Civil Rights, the Left was in favor of Civil Rights and the Right supported segregation. But important Democrat leaders in the House and Senate were from the South, and they weren't enthusiastic AT ALL about civil rights legislation for the colored folk. It took Republican (hiss! boo!) votes in Congress to pass the civil rights laws.
I say: Pick your issue(s), not your party.
And don't believe anyone who gets paid for their opinion.
Yes, but so are they
I for one am looking forward to Rubin & Eisen being "vocal about culture", because if there's one thing we don't have enough of, it is old people being vocal about culture.
Eisen said they will have a humor column and a cooking column. I don't know what recipes they will offer, but as for humor, the promo video is pretty laughable, so I'm counting that as a win.
C U next Tuesday
Loved Bill way back on Fox News. Discovered him around the 2000 election. He was different from anyone else on tv at the time.
I can't stand Shawn. But Bill, he has lived an interesting life. School teacher at one point.
The only one of that crowd that seems not completely crazed is Podhoretz. Maybe because his old man (pro-Trump) is still around to knock some occasional sense into him.
Crow will not be one of recipes
I hope Jen didn’t have to personally guarantee a loan for this new venture. It is going to crash and burn. 🔥
Way before Trump 45, Jenn Rubin was for moving the US consulate from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Trump becomes president and moves the consulate from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Jenn Rubin denounces the move.
Any disagreement with any Contrarian= 'trarian'
Bromidean takes/tales ???
mccullough,
Starting a blog is profoundly easy, trivial even.
Attracting and maintaining readership? That's the hard part.
"Imagine having a whole political stance that consisted of nothing but loathing Donald Trump."
Drew Holden
@DrewHolden360
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To commemorate this tragic news, a quick 🧵thread 🧵of some of my favorite Jennifer Rubin tweets.
She will be missed. See why. ⤵️
https://twitchy.com/justmindy/2025/01/13/drew-the-best-of-jen-rubin-n2406596
Well at least the ancient clip of her losing battle of wit with O'Reilly clearly illustrates the sloppy work ethic she brings to bear with her version of contrarianism. "Ill prepared indeed!"
Difference is Bill started as an actual journalist back when that meant doing the legwork to present facts and graduated from the Kennedy School at Harvard with a poli-sci graduate degree. His bloviator act was so convincing that Colbert made a career of poorly emulating it. Notice though how Bill carefully hones in on Rubin's unsubstantiated generalizations and the more specific and factual he asks her to be the faster she crumbles.
That there is the journalistic gold rarely seen on what's left of the Fox People Magazine Channel.
Liberals care to the extent they have a "conservative" whom they can cite as having the proper opinion about Trump. What Tim M wrote above. Progressives love to quote their house monkey conservatives.
so, i looked it up; Jen Rubin is 4 days younger than i am..
She's 62 years old.. She just got FIRED..
She's starting a New Career and web site!
Again, she's 62 years old; what ever happened to retirement?
I realize that our Professor is 75(ish), and that she does this blog..
But kinda a big difference between continuing a blog, and starting a new career.
Why doesn't Jen Rubin go away? HOW can we miss her? If she won't Go Away?
Makes it all the more remarkable that Meghan McCain is back firmly on the right after living through the misrule of the Biden years.
She’s a dullard who thinks she’s Eleanor Clift. Gosh, I miss the McLaughlin Group.
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