Sunday Morning Comin' Down: Carly Fiorina's Blood Libel

You will excuse me if I skip over Shuck Todd (Motto: "Still beatin' that dead horse boss!") using his time with Secretary Clinton this morning to shore of his Beltway cred by beating of dead horse of "Emailghaaaazi" for the umpteenth time and move on to the much more gruesomely a musing subject of Destroyer of Companies, Carly Fiorina, going all in on a modern version of the Blood Libel as her passport to the White House.

As I have written before, the Blood Libel --

...(also blood accusation) is an accusation that Jews kidnapped and murdered the children of Christians to use their blood as part of their religious rituals during Jewish holidays. Historically, these claims—alongside those of well poisoning and host desecration—have been a major theme in European persecution of Jews.

-- is one of oldest, ugliest, most profoundly dangerous lies in history.  Dredged straight from Middle Ages, when frenzied Catholic mobs, whipped up by monstrous slander, would torture and murder innocent Jews, it is also a lie the drips e-f-f-o-r-t-l-e-s-s-l-y from the lips of ghouls like Ms. Fiorina.

It is a lie which Ms. Fiorina defends aggressively against the pesky intrusion of facts and reality (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars) -- 

-- and it is a lie which keeps Ms. Fiorina rising in the polls because, frankly, there is damn little difference anymore between the modern GOP base, and pig-ignorant Middle Ages yahoos who could be prodded into the worst kinds of atrocities over and over again by fear, bigotry and the Bible.

Of course you would not know any of this if, as part of your court-ordered community service, you had been forced to watch "Meet the Press" today.  In fact, just on the basis of the show's content, one would be hard pressed to figure out that America has two major and distinctly different political parties.  You see, at Shuck Todd's puppet show, there are no Republicans or Democrats at all.  There are no Liberals or Conservatives.  Instead it is the consensus of Mr. Todd's elite, Both Siderist panel that there exists in this country only an undifferentiated slab of humanity called "Murricans" who are also sometimes known as "voters" or the "electorate".  

And it turns out, "issues" do not matter to "voters" at all! 

"Voters" are entirely motivated by their "moods", and consequently it is not the job of elite, Both Siderist pundits to discuss whether some candidate is, say, lying through her fucking teeth or not. They are merely there to note the rise and fall of candidates based on how well they pander to the mood of the monolithic, non-party-affiliated "voter".

David Brooks explains (and yes, emphasis will be added throughout):

DAVID BROOKS:

Yeah, well [Hillary Clinton] was having a little more fun today. Sometimes she's campaigning like she's in Napoleon's march on Moscow, just like a trudge through the winter. This was a little more upbeat, a little more fun. But she's still in her own bubble. Not where the country is, but it's sort of in the Clinton bubble And finally, as Andrea said, she spent her entire political career on the defensive, whether it was the Rose law firm, whether it was Benghazi, whether it was her husband's shenanigans.

She's basically has a defensive posture. And that means she's erecting walls, not trusting people, and there's no romance. People, especially this year, they want a little romance, they want a lot of ideological action going outward. But she's on the defensive. And so that's the core problem. It's not the emails. Nobody's going to disqualify her as president because she used one server versus another. That's not a real scandal. It's her attitude.

See, according to David Brooks, Secretary Clinton's caution has nothing to do with the fact that she and her family have been hunted like wild animals for 20 years by Beltway vampires like David Brooks. That's all just a buncha stuff.

That happened.

In the past.

LaLaLaLaLa!

I mean, who really remembers what really happened anyway? And besides, facts are icky and make pundits like David Brooks look like cowards and frauds and hypocrites, so best stick to fun stuff like moods and attitudes.

And passion!

David Brooks and Shuck Todd explain:

CHUCK TODD:

David, where [Carly Fiorina] showed passion is not, like, she is not accepting any of the fact checks on this Planned Parenthood thing. And she really doesn't want to, you know, she's basically saying, "The details don't matter. You should be outraged."

DAVID BROOKS:

Yeah, well, to Andrew's point, it's not quite clear that reality matters to the electorate right now. And I think that's true with Trump, it's true with her, there are some people that are great campaigners, and some people that are actually good in reality. And so far the good in reality people are not doing so well in the polls.

...Fiorina does not accept the concept that she should answer these questions. She's on the offensive. She's throwing blows. No matter what you ask her, she's throwing blows to the Democrats. And she's just permanent offense.

CHUCK TODD:

Which may explain why she's getting a moment.

DAVID BROOKS:

And that's where the country is. That's the ethos of the country right now.

That's right -- David Brooks believes that wantonly lobbing the Blood Libel into the middle of a presidential campaign and then defending that disgraceful lie to the hilt is not the premeditated act of a professional swindler pandering to the worst instincts of the Republican party's depraved base...

...but merely "the ethos of the country right now."

Also this entire story line does not pair well with Mr. Brooks' fawning column from less than two weeks ago in which he proposed "The Marco Rubio-Carly Fiorina Option" so, uh, I guess he never wrote it.

Certainly none of his colleagues ever mentioned it.

Next -- and strictly from the point of view of grim amusement -- it was hella entertaining to see Mrs. Alan Greenspan (suddenly and far too late) try to grow a conscience --

ANDREA MITCHELL:

But let's face facts here. The facts are also that that fetus was from a Pennsylvania miscarriage. That fetus had nothing to do with Planned Parenthood. And Planned Parenthood does not get federal money for abortions, period. Abortions are 3% of their work. The rest is women's healthcare...

-- and then, as if realizing she was on the verge of violating the cardinal rule of Both Siderism by blaming Republicans for the behavior of Republicans, just as suddenly reverse herself midparagraph and smother her own argument in its crib:

ANDREA MITCHELL:

...Now that said, you're absolutely right. Carly Fiorina is in tune with the mood of the electorate. The electorate, actually in both political parties.

And just in case anyone in the Comcast Human Resources and Both Siderist Enforcement Bureau might have been listening and gotten the impression that Mrs. Alan Greenspan had just blamed Republicans for being Republicans, moments later she took a second, big bite of that turd to prove her loyalty to the corporation:

CHUCK TODD:

Is Hillary Clinton in tune with the mood of the electorate?

ANDREA MITCHELL:

Not so far. Not so far. She's not angry enough. She's not-- And it's hard for her to be angry because then you've got, you know, Donald Trump saying, "She's shrill," which is a sexist word,let's face it. But she has to get around that. But the anger, the passion is all on people going on the attack, whether it's, you know, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Carly Fiorina, or whether it's Bernie Sanders.

You know, both sides so pleeeeeease don't fire me!

And in case at this point you still were still clinging to any fancy-pants notion that this country has two, clearly delineated political parties, one of which is A) a deranged, paranoid, rage-drunk mob which B) just forced its Speaker toes-first through a wood-chipper, Shuck Todd swapped his Both Siderist framing hammer for a Both Siderist sledgehammer to drive such silly notions out of your damn fool Liberal head:

CHUCK TODD:

And by the way, and this is the mood. And this is the electorate that just forced John Boehner out of his job.

Eugene Robinson at least had the decency to be gobsmacked by the sheer enormity and bald-facedness of Ms. Fiorina's Blood Libel:

EUGENE ROBINSON:

Yeah, but I was actually floored by that though because she simply would not deal with the factual issue. She would not deal with the issue that she has misrepresented the facts about that video. And you correctly told her what the facts are. And she simply wouldn't deal with it. I don't think you can continue to do that on a specific issue time after time after time, because people are going to keep bringing it up until you acknowledge that well yes, these are the facts. She wouldn't even acknowledge that fact.

Which Mr. Brooks dismissed with a satisfied, moon-faced smirk.

DAVID BROOKS:

You seem to think the laws of gravity are applying this year. But so far, they haven't applied.

And which, in turn, led to this exchange:

CHUCK TODD:

Well, it's funny you say that--

EUGENE ROBINSON:

--I do forget, I do forget

CHUCK TODD:

Can I just tell you that Bill Kristol wrote this great column yesterday where he basically said, you know...

And that is the exact moment I turned off "Meet the Press".

Because it's just too damn much.

However, even after watching Shuck Todd's claptrap mudslide sweep away any pretense of journalism on Sunday teevee, I have to say that this week, for sheer, surreal Bizarro World impressiveness, nothing exceeded this exchange between Martha Raddatz and Newt Gingrich on "This Week...":

RADDATZ: You, of course, resigned the speakership in '99. What's different here?

GINGRICH: I'm not sure a lot is different. John and I both faced the fact that there was a hardcore group, sort of a minority of the party, who were prepared to cause total chaos. In my case, they had announced they would never vote for me for speaker, and I'd never get to win a smaller majority, I'd never get to the 218. And so you just have chaos in the House...

Let the record show that it was Newt Gingrich who fucking invented that "hardcore group, sort of a minority of the party, who were prepared to cause total chaos."

Let the record further show that Ms. Raddatz did not ask Newt! a single follow-up question to challenge the great, steaming dump he took on her desk.

Let the record also show that Ms. Raddatz did not roll her eyes and make the universal gesture for Giant Blowjob --

-- nor did she wallop Newt! upside his head with a folding chair.

And thus did Martha Raddatz absolve me from ever taking her seriously as a journalist again.