Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Yes, defenestrating Liz Cheney from the top of her Daddy’s pile of lies and treason may be immoral, but would it also be effective?

On “Face the Nation” ...Buncha people talking about Ted Kennedy.

On “Meet the Press” ...Buncha people talking about Ted Kennedy.

On “This Week” ...Buncha Senators talk about Ted Kennedy.

On “Fox News Sunday” ...Dick Cheney! Live and In-Person!


Of course, if you got all distracted by the Kennedy coverage and forgot to get your weekly dose of Cheney over at Fox, George Stephanopoulos obligingly invited Liz “Some people say that my daddy has video of George Stephanopoulos starring as Señor Funpants in a Tijuana donkey show which is why, despite having no credentials or credibility whatsoever, I am inexplicably on teevee virtually every week” Cheney onto his puppet show to lie about torture and stuff.

But as this Sunday slips into the history books, it is the warm, personal stories about Senator Kennedy that I will remember most.

Sen. John Kerry: The way he greeted me with “Why the long face, Junior Senator?” never got old.

Sen. John McCain: I still can’t believe his dad nailed Gloria Swanson.

Sen. Orrin Hatch: Once, my magic underwear was destroyed when we were fishing for Kraken

in the North Atlantic and he loaned me Gloria Swanson’s petticoats until I could get to my emergency stash. Also he took the time to memorize all the lyrics to “Heal Our Land”.

Rep. Barney Frank: You wanna understand Massachusetts politics? An Irishman, a gay man and a Mormon conservabot named Mitt walk into a bar...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein: I still can’t believe his dad nailed Gloria Swanson.

A boy: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

Michael Eric Dyson, Georgetown University sociologist: The solicitude of the uniquely Kennedyesque plenitude that informed the attitude of Obama’s altitude (stops and checks the rhyming dictionary)…horse latitude… necessitude...rectitude. Also, if I may add, one cannot overstate the importance of the pompatus of love.

Dick Cheney: I regret never getting the chance to waterboard him.

Sen. Chris Dodd: When my parents abandoned me in the Senate cloakroom, Teddy raised me as one of his own.

Bill Shakespeare: Love is not love/ When it is mingled with regards that stand/ Aloof from the entire point.

Bob Shrum: In hindsight, I almost regret my part in selling out every one of Ted Kennedy’s values and driving his party to the brink of cringing extinction.

David Gregory: I’ll bet his family is real sad.

Liz Cheney: I regret my daddy never got the chance to waterboard him.

George Will: I once lost my hairpiece while we were fishing for narwhale off the Kennedy Family pier. Teddy loaned me one of the family’s lesser grandnephews to hide my shame until I could replace it.

Sam Donaldson: There…there once. Once was a man. A man, you understand? A man. Fr-fr-from…Nantucket… (collapses sobbing.)


Lastly, ”The Chris Matthews Show” Matthews aired a canned “Does teevee affect politics?” episode with a three-minute Kennedy tribute bolted on to the end, from which we learned that carefully scripted, unfettered lying favors Republicans:

Nixon pimping his kids and a dog named Checkers to divert attention from his political slush fund…

Lee Atwater repeating his despicable “Dukakis wants Black People to rape White Women” and “Dukakis is a pussy who will let America be destroyed”…

The Swiftboat Liars for Bush…

While occasional glimpses of unscripted truth tend to badly fuck Republicans up:

Bush’s “Heckofajob Brownie” moment as New Orleans drowned…

Joseph Welch to Joe McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"…

Sarah Palin being asked tough, gotcha questions like “What papers do you read?”

Or, as Andrea Mitchell summed it up, “Reality matters sometimes.”

But only sometimes, and less and less often these days as the Fourth Estate flees ever further away from its job as the public's honest broker, fact-checker and truth-teller.

Instead lies and truth, spin and facts, news and entertainment are now all the same.

All just one, big, helping of puke-flavored digital pudding.

All just teevee.

Also, Chris, next time you want to give the impression that your show and your little epilogue are all of a piece, make sure you wear the same tie in both segments.

Because reality matters sometimes.



Update: Andrew Sullivan notes that the Chris Wallace's Hallmark Happy Fun Laptime Snugglefest with Unca Dick Cheney was tantamount to "A Teenage Girl Interviewing The Jonas Brothers", adding that:

...there are softball interviews; and then there are interviews like this. It cannot be described as journalism in any fashion. Even as propaganda, which is its point, it doesn't work - because it's far too cloying and supportive of Cheney to be convincing to anyone outside the true-believers. When it comes to Cheney, one of the most incompetent vice-presidents in the country's history, with a record of two grotesquely botched wars, war crimes and a crippling debt, Chris Wallace sounds like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers.

And

When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.

Andrew, everyone knows that Chris Wallace's suite in Hell was reserved and prepaid in full years ago.

Everyone also knows that neither Chris Wallace nor Dick Cheney would be possible without the tens of millions of slavering imbeciles on the Right who hang on their every word.

Tens of millions of slavering imbeciles who simply would not exist in their present state -- a completely brainwashed, goose-steppingly coordinated Democracidal horde and cultural anvil around America's neck straight out of George Orwell's worst nightmares -- had the Right not spent billions of dollars and the last thirty years relentlessly flattering, pandering and cultivating them.

These are your bastard whelplings, Andrew; the mutants and monsters crawling out of your toxic ideological dump.

How will you ever make amends for what you have done?