Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- UPDATE

"It is now impossible to stop Bill Kristol from lying" Edition.

UPDATE:  Brother Charles Pierce opines here that our Fourth Estate most dramatically embarrassed itself this Sunday by not pre-empting "Meet the Press" once again with, oh, let's say Exciting!Jai!Alai!Action and instead let just David Gregory go right on doing that thing he does where he holds his giant, simian features perfectly still and serious-like while equating the people who are trying to put a fire out with the people who are dancing giddily around that fire with Zippo lighters and Jerry cans of gasoline wearing "Arsonists Do It In Flagrante Delicto!" tee-shirts.

Ah, but the winner, and the first non-Cheney champion in our retooled Gobshite derby, is Himself, the Dancin' Master. He takes this week's House Cup for his interview with Bill Clinton in which he attempted to clear a height on the Both Sides Do It bar about which ordinary mortals can only dream.

GREGORY: And the real issue you talk about as well is some of this pain people are feeling in the middle class, the sense that the middle class, that the American dream is slipping away. I look at some of the numbers, 3.4 million Americans who have been out of work for six months plus. You have over 7 million who, by their own admission, are stuck in lower-paying jobs, part-time jobs. How can a Democratic candidate for president-- what challenges would a Democratic candidate for president face running on the Obama economy?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, that's not what anybody should do. You should run on making it better. But he didn't cause the meltdown. The actions that his administration took kept it from being worse. And there had been a concerted effort to stop implementing his economic plan in the second term so none of you have any idea whether they would have worked or not.

GREGORY: But you don't lay this at Speaker Boehner and the Republicans uniquely, do you? I mean, do you really think it's their opposition to the president that has forced him to have such impediments to get the economy growing again?

I do not challenge Brother Pierce's wisdom in this matter.

End UPDATE.

Our family has been road tripping it for the last several days (you haven't seen cool-under-pressure until you have seen Blue Gal carefully sound-editing the podcast in the back seat of a van fulla kids as we roar up Interstate 55.)  It was a fine trip where many necessary things were accomplished that also happened to work out in the being-able-to-spend-time-with-family department much better that we could have ever planned.

So I was pleased and exhausted we piled into bed last night..

...only to awake to find genuine monster on my teevee spouting shit that would have gotten that awful, death's-head ricktus smirk slapped right off of the front his skull over in the Better Universe.

But over in this universe, there is no downside to being Bill Kristol.  He's like a puppy who has been tossed a T-bone every time he shit the rug.  And for no reason our titans of journalism cares to share with us rubes, as the shitpiles he leaves behind have gotten bigger -- as has his lying has gotten more and more blood-drunk and sociopathic -- the T-bone have also gotten bigger, which is why he was on my teevee Sunday morning explaining how George Bush's victory in Iraq was undone by the feckless and faithless Barack Obama (h/t David at Crooks and Liars)

Bill Kristol will never stop lying and never stop demanding that more American blood and treasure be sacrificed to his personal Neocon Moloch.

And why should he?

You see, when David at C/L headlines his post "Vanden Heuvel Shuts Down 'Architect Of Catastrophe' Bill Kristol..." he misses the real story, because no one is going to "shut down" Bill Kristol.  Remember that this was the clown who, when "Time" magazine finally bounced from his featherbedding gig there

the New York Times promptly handed him one the most coveted spots in American journalism...right next fellow Neocon and Kristol's former employee at The Weekly Standard, David Brooks.

Pause for a moment to consider how many thousands of brilliant, deserving opinion writers and astute analysts would kill for a chance for a few column inches in either Time or the NYT.  And yet every single one one of them was bypassed to make room for Bill Fucking Kristol.

And then let it sink in that neither publication made Kristol give up his day-job cranking out Neocon propaganda in order to lazily dash off an occasional, crappy column for their outfits.  They just signed him up, on his terms.

And when Kristol finally shit the bed once too often for the NYT to ignore?

Fox hired him.

And when Roger Ailes finally got tired of him (and -- quick show of hands -- how many of you know that Kristol's Neocon rag, The Weekly Standard, was financed into existence by Rupert Murdoch?) ABC held out the chair for him.  Hired him with real, American money to be a bona fide ABC employee.

And so, no, Katrina Vanden Heuvel did not shut him down.  Because next week she'll be long gone, off lecturing someone else about something else.  And a week or two after that another media-approved Liberal or Centrist will be trotted on to bark at Kristol, or to coo and snuggle with him, but it really doesn't matter which, because after 15 minutes they'll be gone too.  However, like roaches after a nuclear war, Bill Kristol will abide.  He will go right on smirking and shrugging off atrocities that would shame any normal human into stepping in front of a bus.  He will go right on routinely appearing each week on ABC's nationally syndicated network public interest broadcast where he is clearly at liberty to lie and lie and lie and lie.

And so, once again we must calmly skip over all the perfectly understandable wish-fulfillment fantasies about exiting Kristol from the planet, because no one is going to shoot Kristol into the sun.  No one is going to drop him into Iraq, naked, with a target tattooed on his ass.  No one is going to pile up his treasons and sins and lies high enough to blot out the sun, and then defenestrate him from the top of it.

None of that is ever going to happen.

But you know what could happen?  Tomorrow?

Bill Kristol could awake to find himself not only unemployed but unemployable.  He could come into work to find his cubby at ABC cleaned out and a security guard waiting to escort him from the building.  He could open his email to discover that media community has put such a stink on him that not even the producers of "The Jenny McCarthy Show" or the bookers at "Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld" will touch him with a barge pole.

If our media simply aped the most basic "fire that staggeringly incompetent asshole who is always horribly wrong about everything" business model that most successful companies follow, all of this could happen.

But it won't.  Because, according to Young Jonathan Greenberger -- the toddler ABC hired as the executive producer of their nationally syndicated network public interest broadcast -- Kristol is a "brilliant, original thinker":

So excited to have @ananavarro & Bill Kristol join our outstanding @ABC political team. Both brilliant, original thinkers #ThisWeek
— Jonathan Greenberger (@greenbergerj) February 2, 2014

I remember back when ABC News had better sense than that.  From the Seattle Times in 1999 (right around the time Mr. Greenberger was learning out how to cope with toddlers at the Jewish Community Center's day camp in Columbus, Ohio):

ABC Dumps Bill Kristol As It Deals With Sagging `This Week'

By Howard Kurtz

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON - ABC executives, worried about sinking ratings as Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts fall behind Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" on NBC, are starting to overhaul the once-mighty "This Week."

The first victim is Bill Kristol, a conservative presence for three years on the shoot-the-breeze Sunday round table. The Weekly Standard editor taped his last show Wednesday after being told that his contract would not be renewed.

The axing of Kristol comes three months after the departure of the show's executive producer, Dorrance Smith, who, like Kristol, worked in the Bush White House. Several sources confirmed that contrary to the public announcement at the time, Smith was forced out by ABC News President David Westin, who has had an increasingly strong hand in the program.

Smith said Kristol "added a much-needed different perspective from a conservative viewpoint, which I don't think they have any interest in trying to fill. They're tone-deaf when it comes to political evenhandedness. . . . Rather than being journalistically honest, they're much more comfortable with people who share viewpoints closer to their own," he said of ABC management.

...

Smith, a friend of Linda Tripp from their days in the Bush White House, has told friends that he believes ABC management was displeased with some of the reporting he helped provide during the Monica Lewinsky scandal...

The story behind the reason why obviously malignant lunatics like Bill Kristol...and Dick Cheney...and Paul Wolfowitz...and so on...keep getting re-gifted back to the public over and over again must be awesome in its sheer, lurid grotesquerie: I can easily imagine a witchbag of corruption, extortion, fanaticism and greed, with top notes of incest and a smooth, cynical finish that lies somewhere between Senator Pat Geary's relationship with the Corleone Family

and Jaime Lannister's relationship with his sister.

But of course, all of this everyday prostitution of the public airwaves, all of the moral squalor in which our Fourth Estate unrepentantly wallows, is being done either at the behest of, or with the approval of, or under the noses of the same people who are in charge of making the little pictures come out of the teevee machine.

So don't expect any help from those precincts anytime soon.  

Because when it comes to holding the media accountable, remember...
...first they ignore you
...then the laugh at you
...then they go back to ignoring you because, ha! ha!, we control the little pictures coming out of the teevee machine, so fuck you, hippie!

In the meantime you can amuse yourself by counting how many times Republican Hack ad ABC Employee Matthew Dowd uses the phase "both sides" or some variation thereof in a single 8-minute interval.

STEPHANOPOULOS:   Pretty clear from being with the President for a couple of days this week, everything we've seen in the last few weeks, he's given up on Congress completely.  Going to go on offense with the American people and going to continue with these Executive actions. 

DOWD:  Well I think both sides have given up on each other...

And with that, ladies and gentlemen,  we are off to the races!

You can just feel watching the interview and then watching Republicans' reaction to many different things, this incredible frustration that neither side can get anything done right now.

They both think things need to get done. They're frustrated that neither side willing to give on the other side.

...they're both angry about it.

Both sides are -- I think have been reduced to stunts.

Of course, no cavalcade of Conservative propaganda would be complete without a red, white and blue celebration of Teh Tea Party!

STEPHANOPOULOS: So Bill Kristol, this win by Thad Cochran I think surprised a lot of people. Did it surprise you?

KRISTOL: A little bit. They're (inaudible) a very good technical drive of turning out some additional voters. But I think it's a Pyrrhic victory. I mean, the momentum in the Republican Party is not with Thad Cochran. It's with the Tea Party. The Tea Party is the one group in America...

Which we are still being assured at this late date is NOT just the same, old, raving, bigoted Republican base who have finally kicked the Party's cellar door off it hinges and are letting their freak flag fly, but is instead a brand new group of patriotic Murricans, unsullied by the taint of 1) Being completely fucking wrong about everything for +30 years, and 2) Being lying, pants-burning-like-a-tire-fire hypocrites who ferociously oppose things under the Kenyan Usurper which they either never gave a shit about or ferociously supported under the Bush Regime.

KRISTOL: Yes, but they have nominated a lot of nominees who are accepted, in many state, who are acceptable to both the Tea Party and the establishment, are running much more populist campaigns.

I do think the Tea Party infusion into the Republican Party gives the Republicans a chance to be the party of the working class and the middle class.

To get back to our earlier discussion, I very -- Marco Rubio, who gave speeches last week on reform and conservatism; Ted Cruz; Scott Walker; Mike -- all those people can run against Hillary Clinton as spokesmen for working and middle class Americans.

And that is a huge tribute to the Tea Party that they have changed --

DOWD: They're changing the Republican Party. They're changing the Republican Party.

No, you douchebag, they are the Republican Party. They are the Republican Party.

And they always have been the  Republican Party, because (sing it with me now) There. Is No Tea. Party.

Finally, in a brief, driftglass aside, let me say how simultaneously encouraging and incredibly frustrating it is that the charming and delightful Melissa Harris-Perry --

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY 06/28/14 

Is the tea party now in the mainstream?

Is the tea party just a fancy name for the Republican Party? Melissa Harris-Perry explains how the rift between establishment Republicans and the tea party could just be an illusion.

 -- is catching up to where I was four 

...

The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.

Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.

If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".

In Latin.

Backwards.

Else how's that boy ever gonna learn!

and five years ago.

...

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.