Sunday, July 24, 2011

Voice of Empire, Ctd.


Sunday Morning Comin' Down: "We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs ladies and gentlemen!" edition.

At the Mouse Circus, "Meet The Gregory" descended fully into naked, fact-repellent "Both Sides Do It" self-parody with not so much as an eyebrow of hair-extension visible above the absolute tsunami of Centrist Bullshit.

Sample?

Greggers to Presidential Chief-of-Staff Bill Daley:
On both sides...

But both sides...

From the Republican point of view...

Can't you understand their point view?

To demonstrate his great belief in "balance", Greggers then trotted out a panel featuring a former Republican Senator, a current "tea party" Congressman from the Illinois 11th (because according to our Villager Wise Men, "tea party" is a whole different Party than "Republican"), and the Democratic mayor of Newark, whose sole contribution to the conversation was "I agree with the Republicans! I'm the only Democrat who will say that!"

And then we were off to the races.

Former GOP Senator Chuck Hagel:
Both parties are to blame.

Independents roxor! I wanna suck every Independent dick in the Universe.

Andrea Mitchell Mrs. Alan Greenspan:
Both sides!

Both caucuses!

The healthy middle, the disgusted middle...as opposed to the Pelosi-Democrats...and Republicans.
Historian Doris Kearns-Goodwin:
The Center is seen as too passive. We need a Raging Fucking Center. Like Teddy Roosevelt! Like Harry Truman! Too often the passion is on the Left and the Right. What about the Center? Huh? Huh?

And the absolute cherry on top?

David Gregory:
If the Left and the Right are taking over, is their any room for the Center?

Tom Friedman has a column today...


This is a snip from the horrible, horrible column from The Mustache of Understanding
GELLER
over which Greggers was salivating (Don't worry David Brooks; it'll be your turn to have one of your wretched journalistic abominations tongue-bathed next week):

Make Way for the Radical Center
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: July 23, 2011


If this kind of idiocy by elected officials sends you into a hair-pulling rage and leaves you wishing that we had more options today than our two-party system is putting forward — for instance, a party that would have offered a grand bargain on the deficit two years ago, not on the eve of a Treasury default — not only are you not alone, but help may be on the way.

Thanks to a quiet political start-up that is now ready to show its hand, a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket, elected by an Internet convention, is going to emerge in 2012. I know it sounds gimmicky — an Internet convention — but...
Really, Tom? You really believe that two years ago -- back when the global economy was in free fall -- was the time to start negotiating massive budget cuts?

Back when every economist in the Universe agreed we should be spending like crazy to staunch the wound?

When even offering 1/3 of the stimulus as tax cuts was not enough for the Right to boycott it entirely and run against it, even asn they took credit if for it with their constituents ?

Were you just drunk, Tom? Living in a cave? Or were you too bust fellating Chinese billionaires and imaginary Indian cab drivers for your next awful book to notice the Right storming through America's town halls shrieking about Death Panels and "Taking Their Country Back!" two years ago?

Were you asleep during the whole Kenyan Birth Certificate freakshow?

Did you somehow miss the Koch brother and Fox News funding the rebranding of the Pig People as "The Tea Party"?

Miss all those placards showing our Secret Muslim President as Hitler, as a Witch Doctor and generally as an illegitimate, uppity Negro filling up the GOP tent revivals?

Did you miss our drooling corporate media falling all over themselves to treat the Great Teabagger Lie as Gospel?

Did you miss how the entire Right conspired to aggressively deny that the past 8 years eever happened?

Of course, from cheerleading the waste of trillions of dollars and hundred of thousands of lives to send a "Suck On This" bouquet to the Middle East, to snuggling his porn-star mustache onto the asscrack of whatever Beltway bullshit is on the menu this week, Friedman -- a soft, incredibly rich, dimwitted, talent-starved hack who invents ideologically convenient histories that never were and will never in a million years have to actually live in the chaos his idiotic ideas create -- is indeed a perfect symbol for how completely broken our media has become.

Honestly, this was old-school Soviet-bad, so obvious and ham-handed that it rivaled anything you might have seen during the depths of the worst of those Cheney-Rummy-Bush-Feith lie-a-thons.

And it taught the same lesson: The crazier and more derelict and dangerous the Right gets, the more the Villagers will rise to the occasion...by beating up the Left. That our media is run by absolutely contemptible insider careerists who will roll out with perfectly straight faces as many comical, bizarre, terrified lies as are needed to protect the Beltway Common Wisdom.

And this Sunday the iron fist of our corporate masters reached so blatantly into our the nation's "news" to control the message that frankly only an imbecile or a paid liar could possibly have missed it.

Mouse Circus employees had been put on notice by their bosses that no one was going to be permitted to allocate the blame for anything anywhere but exactly between the genuinely anarchic and unhinged Right, and an entirely fictional Unreasonable Left. And the factual accuracy of literally everything -- from Allan West's unhinged attack on Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to Harry Truman's record -- was to be beaten unconscious and thrown into Centrism Wood Chipper to serve their filthy agenda.

Elsewhere, I watched serial liar George Will continued to pretend that it is 1980, or 1952, or 1926...that Barack Obama is just being a big baby --
The President this week in his tantrum-cum-press-conference...
--- and that the Tea Party is actually our nation's salvation

Then a few minutes later I wondered aloud to an empty house what the Hell a Fox Business Network executive was doing on the same panel as serial liar George Will on ABC?

The answer came moments later: Defending Centrism -- surprise! -- and his network's craven coverage of the grotesque criminal antics of his paymasters.

My instincts tells me what we were really witnessing was an all-hands-on-deck "Fuck You" by our corporate owners to President Obama's very mild and loooooong overdue breaching of the "fourth wall" of Villager Lying -- "Whilst thou may beat on Dirty Fucking Hippies for imaginary sins all the live long day, Thou Shalt NEVER point out that the Right is always fucking wrong"(from President Obama's White House news conference. [emphasis added]):
Last point I’ll make here. I mean, I’ve gone out of my way to say that both parties have to make compromises. I think this whole episode has indicated the degree to which at least a Democratic President has been willing to make some tough compromises. So when you guys go out there and write your stories, this is not a situation where somehow this was the usual food fight between Democrats and Republicans. A lot of Democrats stepped up in ways that were not advantageous politically. So we’ve shown ourselves willing to do the tough stuff on an issue that Republicans ran on.
Sunday's Mouse Circus was our Villagers' way of leaving a video horse head in his bed: a reminder that, as long a they control the media, that message will never be allowed.

And as an extra bonus coup de grace to any Liberals who still watch this criminally dishonest drivel, the only remotely Left-leaning voice was on teevee anywhere today was Davos diva, content-thief and the Establishment's safe "liberal" media mogul







Arianna Huffington.

We are so screwed.

9 comments:

alise said...

Who needs ipecac in the house when you've got Friedman for your reading pleasure?

As for the Mouse Circus, that they've stepped up the dog and pony show doesn't surprise me in the least. As Allen Ginsberg once said "Whoever controls the media, the
images, controls the culture."

And our corporate masters are gonna make damn sure just who it is that's at the controls.

Yep, we're well and truly screwed...

prof_fate said...

--- and that the Tea Party is actually our nation's salvation

Almost right, Mr. Will: The Tea Party is our nation's salivation.

The floodgates were already open wide, but Citizens United just plain dynamited the dam, didn't it?

Cirze said...

Dg,

After picking myself up off the floor I realized I must have that quote for my blog.

May I?

Pleassssseeeeee?

It's just the best ever written about a douche-bag and deserves much wider circulation.

Wish we could think of some reason for him to have to live in Iraq or Afghanistan for a year.

And let his billionaire ass be shot off by the freedom fighters.

Love ya, baby!

S

Friedman -- a soft, incredibly rich, dimwitted, talent-starved hack who invents ideologically convenient histories that never were and will never in a million years have to actually live in the chaos his idiotic ideas create -- is indeed a perfect symbol for how completely broken our media has become.

Mister Roboto said...

We are so screwed.

So does this mean we're finally on the same page here? :-D

driftglass said...

prof_fate,
Boom go the troglodytes.

Suzan,
Be my guest.

L & L,
Not one of our problems is without a solution. Not one of our problems is worse than what my grandparents lived through in the 1930s, or the average African American lived through for 19/20ths of our history. Say, perhaps instead of hanging out in disreputable blogs full of Pollyannas you get to work sprucing you you own blog http://domoorigotto.blogspot.com/?
You seem to have lots and lot of time on your hands, and many exciting opinions about how doomed we all are. And after all, who doesn't love a concerned citizen whose whole life appears to consist of stopping strangers on street year after year after year to tell them that their existences are meaningless?

Mister Roboto said...

Say, perhaps instead of hanging out in disreputable blogs full of Pollyannas you get to work sprucing you you own blog http://domoorigotto.blogspot.com/?

Not a bad suggestion at all. :-)

Anonymous said...

Paul Krugman has been reading Driftglass:

"...no matter how badly Republicans behave, they don’t draw condemnation from the Very Serious People. All you get is tut-tutting about how politics is awful, and if only we had a third party to install Mike Bloomberg as dictator president all would be well."

Michael said...

Another well written piece, thank you for putting it into words. You touch on truths most welcome. Your opinion on the lack of a non GOP voice in the media is an old one, and as you clearly and intelligently state, it IS important to repeat. It's one thing to censor the narrative, and I do understand who and why, but I wonder...even though the media refuses to give time to a non conservative viewpoint why don't the politicians from our side bring these things up when they have the damned chance?! I have yet to hear ANYONE state the fact that more than a trillion and a half dollars was lost in 401Ks during the Bush years.Pensions and retirement plans were WIPED OUT. What about the Citizens United decision, where's the @#$%^&* outrage over THAT?! If a glib senator like Franken or Sanders started to Gloom and Doom over that ridiculous C-U ruling you WOULD see results! We could certainly use some Howard Dean right now.

someofparts said...

Making the public distrust folks like us is a feature, not a bug. They don't have to persuade their audience that they are honest. The bar doesn't have to be that high. All they have to do is persuade them not to trust us and they achieve their goals. It's a snake hypnotizing a mouse.