Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Thrash The Vote” Edition

At the Mouse Circus on Sunday, you could flip to virtually any channel and watch some version of White Ladies Arguing over Palin.

It looked kinda like this:


As to the rest of it, the most interesting part was watching Paul Begala launch the opening coda of the "McSame sold his honor to monsters" ad blitz that has begun blanketing the airwaves and blogosphere.

The second most interesting and infuriating part was how wrong just about everyone in the world seems to be getting this story.

From Fox News Sunday, with emphasis added by me:

WALLACE: But in any case, do you have any problem with what McCain is doing by, for instance, saying — which a lot of people thought was kind of made up — that Obama was smearing Palin?

ROVE: Yeah. Well, first of all, I do think that the lipstick remark was an inappropriate — and maybe it was unconscious, but it was a deliberate slap at Governor Palin. The only time this word has intruded in recent months in the campaign was in her, you know, self-deprecating remark at the convention. So for him to use the lipstick remark less than two weeks after she used it struck me as too much of a coincidence not to have been a deliberate attack.

driftglass: This is, of course, a flat-out lie. But you already know that.

ROVE: But look. Both campaigns are making a mistake, and that is they are taking whatever their attacks are and going one step too far. We saw this this week, for example, in the Obama ad where he makes the point, a legitimate point, that John McCain came to the United States Congress in 1982 and that he has been a longtime Washington insider. But they then say he doesn’t even know how to use a — you know, doesn’t send e-mail. Well, this is because his war injuries keep him from being able to use a keyboard. He can’t type.

driftglass: Lie number two.

ROVE: You know, it’s like saying he can’t do jumping jacks. Well, there’s a reason why he can’t raise his arms above his head. There’s a reason why he doesn’t have the nimbleness in his fingers.

WALLACE: All right, and for fair game, what is McCain doing that goes a step too far?

ROVE: Well, McCain has gone in some of his ads — similarly gone one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test.
They don’t need to attack each other in this way. They have legitimate points to make about each other that are beyond, you know, the…

WALLACE: Real quick question — 30 seconds. Do they need to be 100 percent passing the truth? Just, in other words, when you were running Bush’s campaign, did you care whether some fact-check organization…

ROVE: No, and look, you can’t trust the fact-check organizations, with all due respect. They’re human beings. They’re individuals. They’ve got their own biases built in there. But both campaigns ought to be careful about it. They ought to — there ought to be an adult who says, “Do we really need to go that far in this ad? Don’t we make our point and won’t we get broader acceptance and deny the opposition an opportunity to attack us if we don’t include that one little last tweak in the ad?”

A cloud of pure, feculent cotton candy whipped up out of nothing and served on a stick, and yet everywhere – and I mean everywhere -- the headlines read: Rove: McCain has gone “one step too far”.

No, no and no again.

Karl Rove is a criminal and a congenital liar down to his mitochondria, and by now the first question the media should ask itself every time he opens his mouth is: “How is Rove lying this time and what part of the Neocon Agenda is he pushing?”

But they never do.


Also, the bearded ladies and dog-faced boys who put on their little playlets under the Mouse Circus big top are never free-standing acts; they are almost always part of a larger narrative being sold to the public, and this last Sunday all Rove represented was the final act of a drama in four parts.

Act I: We open on John McSame, who appears to have gone so wildly and despicably overboard with the lies that even his pet teacup poodle media are starting to make unhappy little yipping sounds.

Act II: On “This Week” Carly Fiorina rushes to her meal-ticket's defense with more long-debunked zombie lies -- "Sure things have gotten negative, but Barack Obama went negative first" -- that go completely unchallenged by the MSM, because apparently in the spare 30 minutes I have on any given day, I am capable of following politics more closely than George Stephanopoulos.

Act III: On “Meet the Press” Rudy Ghouliani with the classic, wingnut "But you made me beat you!" alibi -- "It's not McSame's fault. If Barack Hussein Obama would just debate McSame in a venue of McSame's choosing, then McSame wouldn't have to lie like a three time loser junkie caught with his baby's diapers stuffed with crack. And by the way, were you aware that Barack Hussein Obama is a filthy Socialist?"

And finally, in Act IV, Karl Rove takes the stage to both cover McSame's getaway under the hail of bullshit, “both sides do it” equivalencies, and stick a knife right in the chest of icky “fact check” organizations which keep embarrassing his candidates by pointing out the inconvenient fact that they are liars.

Rove is a sociopath, Ghouliana is a carnage-pimp and Fiorina sees John McSame as her political 401K (at least until he sent her back to Failed CEO Coventry for going hilariously off-message.) The GOP is owned and operated by degenerates and monsters, and this whole drama had absolutely nothing to do with raising the standards of the debate.

Nothing.

The Republican strategy for the Fall was, is, and will continue to be to contaminate the public discourse with so many lies, bluster, faux outrage and irrelevant jetsam that the sheer avalanche of it will overwhelm the swing voters (on whom this election turns) and crush the media.

It is remarkably similar to a phenomenon dubbed “thrashing” in the Big Iron days of I.T; a state in which (according to my own, very loose and civilian-friendly definition) a CPU becomes overloaded with so many simultaneous and conflicting demands for system resources that the computer loses its ability to process information, priorities and instructions altogether and basically gives up and starts flailing around randomly.

When an ignorant or inattentive public perceives that the entire system is broken, they will punish everyone; the guilty and the (relatively) innocent alike: a cultural reflex that always redounds to the benefit of the most despicable. So, while survey after survey finds the public furious and frustrated by a do-nothing Congress, ask any ten outraged citizens and I guarantee you that eight of them have absolutely no idea that the reason Congress is deadlocked is that Republicans have spent the last two years using parliamentary napalm to carpet bomb every single fucking thing.

That the same party that screamed "Up Or Down Vote!" in the headlines every time Democrats even considered blocking a vote when they were in the Majority...has now broken all records for killing votes.

This is what happens when the majority of the citizens in a democracy have no fucking idea how their government works.

Which is why, far from being a sudden freak moment of honesty from Don Karleone, this Sunday was instead a careful experiment in finding the precise GOP mendacity price-point.

Finding the exact volume and intensity at which Rovian lies and smears will cause ignorant swing voters to "thrash" and shut down, but not so much that they will start to notice that both sides are NOT equally to blame, causing backlash against the GOP.

And while we are on the subject of Conservatives appearing to spontaneously regrow a shred of conscience, as regards David Brooks’ most recent “What’s that Poo Smell?” epiphany that his Party is a bloated corpse being towed like a reeking Easter Parade balloon through the empty rituals of politics by rich fascists to the cheers of poor imbeciles...so sorry, Bobo, but the last chopper took off from roof of the Goldwater GOP years ago, with Bill Buckley and John Dean clinging to the runners.

Just ahead of the hordes of bigots, barbarians and Christopaths who have run your Party ever since.

The Party for whom you have carried water your whole career and the President with whom you have so eagerly spooned these last seven, horrifying years did not come out of nowhere. The groundwork had been laid for them, quite openly, brick-by-brick, for the last 30 years, while people like you, Bobo, got paid a small fortune to mix the mortar.

And now, with the coming of the McSame/Palin ticker, you have the unmitigated nerve to come over all shocked and disappointed, when in reality they are really nothing more than the final, utterly predictable chapter of the Modern Conservatism you have stoutly defended year after year.

A ticket that perfectly highlights the two, remaining halves of the GOP: a doddering survivor of a bygone political age desperately pawing through his underwear drawer to find one last shred of honor to pawn to win an election on behalf of a Party that long ago evicted anyone with a conscience or a soul…

…paired up with a glittering, ferocious, softcore little

Falwell-in-bunny-boots who doesn’t know a fucking thing about the world except what she’s read on the deck of "Neocon Hegemony, Jebus and You" flash cards her handlers have been drilling her on for the last three weeks.

And finally, I will have the good sense not to even hint that a recent, clever, talking picture put together by the hilarious folks over at 23/6 featuring video of “King Kong”


and “The Last Temptation of Christ”

mapped into the green screen behind John McSame during his speech to the Republican Convention might have been in any way influenced by this photoshop from the week before

featuring “King Kong” and “The Passion of the Christ” mapped into the green screen behind John McSame during his speech to the Republican Convention.

Because that would be rood :-)