Sunday Morning Comin' Down

You see, in my trade, this is called - what you did - you cracked out of turn. Huh? You see? You crumbed the play.

-- House of Games

This was the week that Chuck Todd cracked out of turn and answered the Big Question: Why do corporate Dremels like Chuck Todd let Republicans roll him every fucking week? Why does he let monsters use his program as their bidet by lending the public airwaves and the tattered credibility of "Meet the Press" to serial liars and frauds over and over and over again?

Well, it turns out that we in the despised Liberal blogosphere were once again right all along. The reason Conservative liars and monsters get away with murdering the truth week after week -- live and on national teevee -- is that if any of the hosts of American's major network Sunday Gasbag Conclaves ever called the liars and the monsters out...or if those hosts fail to meticulously balance out actual Conservative atrocities with imaginary Liberal atrocities (see "Sides, Both"), they will hurt the delicate fee-fees of the liars and the monsters, and they and their friends won't come over to Luke Russert's Dad's Basement to play no more (no transcript available as of this writing):

We all sit there, because we all know, the first time we bark is the last time that they do the show. You say something, and sometimes it is last time they will ever come on your show. There is that balance.

Here's the video (h/t Heather at Crooks and Liars):

Our media is broken because people like Chuck Todd would rather make a very good living sucking up to monsters 

than a less-than-lavish living using their constitutionally-sanctified profession to do the hard job of digging out the truth of things and bringing that truth to the people.

Because now that Roger Ailes has succeeded in creating a vast and extremely profitable Conservative Alternate Reality Propaganda Machine on the graves of Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite, Chuck Todd needs the indulgence of liars and the monsters far more than they need him.

And all he has to do to stay in their good graces is to sell the rest of us out, one lie at at time, week after week after week.

It must be quite a thing to both preside over the death of one's own profession and to provide running, self-pitying commentary on it's execution even as you help to bang the last nails into its gibbet.  But I'm sure, at the end of the day, in the silence of his own thoughts, Chuck Todd has several million reasons to tell himself that he is doing the right thing, both for Chuck Todd and for the rest of Murrica.

Because, after all, we're a family:

Oh, and in case you were keeping score at home, you can add infamous liar, Weekly Standard hack, Iraq war architect and official biographer for Vice President Richard Cheney, Stephen F. Hayes --

[Hayes] is well known for his writings postulating an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. He wrote, for example, "there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans." Hayes authored a book on this subject entitled: The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America [ISBN 0-06-074673-4]. His major source was a leaked memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to the U.S. Congress on 27 October 2003.

-- to the list of unreconstructed Bush regime dead-enders who now draw a paycheck from Fox News.

For a much more satisfying use of your valuable time, check out Batocchio's monumental 2014 Jon Swift Memorial Roundup (The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves).

This is a tradition started by the late Jon Swift/Al Weisel, who was a fine writer and big believer in small blogs. Each year, Batocchio undertakes the Herculean task of gathering the Best of the Smalls and linking them all under one roof. There is nothing else like it anywhere, and, in addition to being a terrific source of great reading material for you lazy bastids all together and tied up with a bow, it is also a breath of living nostalgia, reminding us who were there when blogging was young of the vibrant chaos that the blogosphere used to be before the Great Stratification.

He's a good egg, Batocchio is, and he has my sincere thanks for doing this amazing thing.



PS: I am woefully behind on my correspondence, so I apologize to all of you who have been patiently waiting on my tardy replies.