Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"The Gingrich Rules cannot be destroyed, Gimli, son of Glóin, by any craft that we here possess." Edition.

We have once again arrived to that moment in the Möbius Strip circle-jerk that is our political media that has become depressingly familiar to all Liberals out here in exile from polite society.  That moment when the worst people in America head to their corporate root cellars, hunker down and protect their phony-baloney jobs as the leading edge of the Shit Sturm und Drang which they helped create bears down on us all.

This Sunday, America's Sad Clown of Centrism, Ron Fournier, once again gave up any pretext of being anything but a happy little parasite living off of the decaying garbage that was once his profession, "Meet the Press" once again broke out the pure, Vibranium Both Siderist storm shutters to seal themselves off from external realities entirely and The Gingrich Rules once again kicked in hard, as prophesied by yours truly just a couple of weeks ago:

Sure, watching a publicly disgraced con man and serial adulterer like Newton Leroy Gingrich appear on a television network which until recently had been run as the personal brothel of disgraced liar and serial sexual predator Roger Ailes...

...in order get pissy with Megyn Kelly about her "fascination" with sex and her lack of ethics...

...was epic..,

And the follow-on weirdnesses from inside the various precincts of the Wingnut Death Star as it blows up real good were equally hilarious...

But for us old internet hands, now the real game begins:  counting down to see which Important Teevee Media Person draws the short straw and is stuck with the task of helping to rehabilitate Newt's public image this time.

Because as we have documented in painstaking detail on this blog over the course of many years, those are The Gingrich Rules.

But first, for the benefit of America's rat's nest of million-dollar professional Beltway pundit's who are presently running around in a blind panic and swearing on the lives of their children that this horrendous turn of events has come as a complete surprise to them because who could possibly have seen this hellacious shitstorm coming...

...I offer this tiny bit of history from a 10-buck amateur nobody Liberal blogger writing from the middle of Middle America a decade ago, just a few days before another election:

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When Your Context Becomes Your Coffin

...the Bush White House is a reeking haggis made from the diseased organs of the Watergate White House and run straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Nixon, but this is not about that shameful chapter in modern Republican history.

This is about the Gerald Ford Coda at the end of Nixon’s dark symphony.

Not the pardon -- which was an awful mistake but one I accept Ford made for honest reasons – but his run for the Presidency in his own right in 1976.

Now I liked Jerry Ford. He was an older-school, kinder, gentler Rockefeller Republican. Shit, put him back in the House, embedded in a Party of men and women like him, and Us and Them would have a lot to talk about.

A lot to agree on, or to at least dispute over respectably, and from which each side could retire from the field with honor. Because in that Universe, the Center would once again really mean something.

In that Universe, Compromise would be a virtue and not be an epithet.

In that Universe, the GOP would not be run by that bottom-feeding Morlocks like Grover Norquist who liken bipartisanship to date-rape.

But that is long ago and far away in the land of Never Was; in a place where political comity and collegiality had not been vaporized under a premeditated and coordinate rain of Unholy Partisan Nuclear Fire from Hannity and Coulter, Roberston and Dobson, Gingrich and Limbaugh, Rove and Atwater, Racists and Theocrats.

All of whom have one thing in common: they are completely cool with a Constitution-immolating, Liberty-razing Pyrrhic victory. Dee-lighted with the thought of it, in fact, so long as they get to squat in the ruins and play King on the rubble of what was once a great nation.

In the Here and Now, the Center is nothing more than Tom Friedman’s morally indefensible, intellectually flaccid flophouse. To be found in any given hour at whichever GPS location happens to be exactly halfway between wherever Jerry Falwell and Harry Reid happens to be on any given issue.

(Ignoring, of course, the simple fact that Harry Ried’s positions look an awful lot like where Jerry Ford used to be, and Falwell is about one Guyana jungle, one pair of sunglasses and 300 gallons of Koolaid short of being Jim Jones.)

Of course making such a staggeringly obvious observation would affront Tom Friedman’s essential dishonesty and laziness – his Long Con depends entirely on mechanically blaming Both Sides Exactly Equally no matter what atrocities the GOP commit mere inches from his face, so don’t expect him to grow a spine and a conscience any time soon.

But this is about Jerry Ford, 1976, and 2006.

Affable guy, Jerry, as I have already mentioned. And he did what he could to set things a’rights. Who, for example, can ever forget his Whip Inflation Now initiative? (I have a whole box of “W.I.N.” buttons stashed away here at castle driftglass next to the Y2K jerky and dehydrated Oban powder...just in case.) Or his prescient pronouncements regarding the freedom of the Polish people years before their chains were actually broken?

But when the basic material you have work with is so putrid, you better be the original Smoove B, Love Man if you want to pull it off.

And Jerry wasn’t. He came across as bumbling and addled. In the volatile world that Watergate left behind, one misstep might have been forgiven, but Jerry made several.

And the there was the whole falling down problem. Then Chevy Chase piled on, and people started watching for Jerry to stumble. Which he did. A shame, really: he was a graceful man and quite the athlete in his day.

A lot of factors conspired to defeat Gerald Ford: Nixon, Reagan, James Earl Carter, the fall of South Vietnam and the Mayagüez to name a few.

But it would also be fair to say that context killed his Presidency. Once seen and decisively mocked as ineffectual and bumbling – once that narrative killbox was clamped around him – every other misstep resonated louder and louder as a reflection of a larger Basic Truth.

That’s why, three weeks before this 2006 election, my thoughts turn to Jerry and 1976.

Because from Iraq to Katrina to DeLay to the parade of the Grand Old Pedophiles, the same fractal repeats itself.

Thirty years ago, to get and hold power, the GOP consciously decided to court racists and theocrats, and make ferocious war on the Truth as a matter of electoral strategy.

And as long as the truth was an abstract thing -- someone else’s brother dying, someone else’s money being looted, someone else’s rights being violated, someone else’s father tortured, someone else's mother losing her pension, someone else’s kids being hunted, someone else’s country being fucked into the ground -- Republicans, being the morally degenerate creatures that they are, had no problem whatsoever with the Truth being waterboarded.

It was all just good fun until a Republican Congress -- now openly led by raving theocrats -- decided to belligerently intrude into the private life-and-death decisions of a single family named Schiavo.

And in response to the jolt of nausea the Middle felt at seeing the naked face of the Christopaths who really run their Party, the Right Wing Hate Machine -- incapable of admitting error and taking corrective action -- just turned the volume up a little louder.

Then a Republican President let an American city die because he was too busy clearing brush on his fake ranch in Crawford to be bothered with the drowning of an American city and a buncha dying Negroes.

And the Right Wing Hate Machine turned the volume up a louder still. Blame the poor. The weak. The elderly. The dying. The brown. They just let their racist freak flag fly because, hey, they won in 2004 so now it's finally acceptable to embrace your inner Klansman in the public square!

Right?

Right?

Then we find out this Republican President lied us into a war, and as Americans are maimed and killed for those lies, he has been rectifying the problems by lying about his lies.

For years.

And the Family Values Christians who operate Right Wing Hate Machine practically snap the fucking volume knob off, calling veteran’s cowards and critic’s traitors.

Then we find out this war we were lied into actual breeds the very disease we were told it was supposed to cure, and as it all falls apart, the Right Wing Hate Machine rams the rhetoric up to an eardrum-shattering shriek because, having gone to that well so many times, it is literally all they know how to do anymore.

And in this soundstorm of thundering rhetoric that is no longer even tangentially related to Reality at any point, the sleepy Middle slooowly wakes and begins to see what the rest of us have known all along: that all the GOP knows how to do is fuck things up and steal.

And when the Truth they have been so hysterically trying to dam up starts breaching their lies -- when it all blows up in their faces -- all they know how to do is duck and cower like a Yellow Elephant desperately hiding from a Marine recruiter. It was blame Clinton, blame soldiers, blame vets, blame children, blame the media and blame everyone else in the world for their own sins, crimes, and criminal incompetence.

Because they are, in their own way, where Ford was 30 years ago: welded into a context of their own construction, and unable to get out.

The really, lasting story of Mark Foley scandal was not that a pedophile was loose in the Party of God, or even that the Party itself knew about it and did nothing because power is more important to them than the safety of children. Hell, anyone looking at the Iraq or New Orleans knows that the GOP does not give a shit about the lives and deaths of ordinary Americans except in the case of a Pat Tillman when their demise can be spun into a pro-Bush press release.

No, the real story is found in tracking the reaction abroad in the land.

First the stunned shock by Party faithful.

Then the resounding, “Well, DUH!” reply to that shock. The mocking “Where the fuck have you meatheads been for the last six years” response to those who were stunned by those of us who had not been living on a steady diet of Limbaugh Koolaid and dumbass pills for most of our adult lives.

Then a deafening stillness before the storm really broke. Caught red-fucking-handed trolling for children and covering it up, how would the Party of God react?

This was a quiet filled to overflowing with the silent, hopeless prayers of the rank and file millions:

“Oh, please don’t embarrass us in front of the Liberals again. 

We’re tired of defending you craven hucksters. 

We’re tired of backing chickenhawks against genuine war heroes. 

Please don’t shit yourselves and run away, then whine and lie and blame your siblings like spoiled children again. 

Please for the love of God step up, man-up and don’t show yourself to be the weasely, soul-dead, abject cowards and pussies the Liberals say you are. 

Again.”

Ah, but was there ever any doubt how the Party of Falwell and Coulter and Rove would react?

Still fighting its ridiculous, rear-guard action against a Truth that surrounds them now on every side, the Party of Personal Responsibility melted down on camera so embarrassingly, so completely and so predictably as to almost defy parody.

Of course they blamed Clinton.

And Pelosi.

And the media.

And, finally, the children themselves.

In the face of the child sex predators and their enablers they have sheltered in their midst, instead of looking into their own filthy souls and confronting the monsters they have let nest there, they did what they always do; looked to Karl Rove to come down off the mountain with tablets of New Talking Points that would let them off the hook for their sickening behavior.

They’ve fallen once too often.

And now they can’t get up.

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Did you notice how so very little has changed?

How the GOP base is not just the same ugly, ignorant shitpile they were a decade ago, but have gotten an order of magnitude worse?  How it is now literally acceptable on the Right to "embrace your inner Klansman in the public square"? How the criminals and frauds and sociopaths in the media who pandered to them, enabled them and profited hugely thereby remain unpunished, unrepentant and gainfully employed?

How Both Siderism is still the Patronus Charm of the Punditocracy?

This -- all of this -- is what must end if we are ever to begin to heal our country.

And none of this can end as long as The Gingrich Rules...

CHUCK TODD:  And joining me now from the other side is former Speaker of the House and a current Donald Trump supporter, Newt Gingrich. Speaker Gingrich, welcome back to Meet the Press, sir.

NEWT GINGRICH: Chuck, it's great to talk to you.

CHUCK TODD: Let me start with reading from a memo you wrote on behalf of the RNC earlier this year, principals for planning the 2016 general election campaign... 

... remain the law of the land:

CHUCK TODD: Can I ask you quickly, you use the word "let the corruption continue," have we been too loose with some words? And I say that because, you know, there's actual corruption that is a crime and there is sometimes we use that word to describe legal politics. Fair or not, do you worry that we let language get too lose?

NEWT GINGRICH:  No, Chuck, I worry, and with all due respect to you as a person, we're pretty good friends, I worry that the elite media has blindly refused to tell the truth. Every foreign gift, every foreign speech--

Not a mumbling word about Megyn Kelly.  Not a whisper about Gingrich's absolute shitwagon fiasco on Fox News.  Because Newt knows the secret word.  The secret handshake.  The shibboleth.

Because the Gingrich Rules can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom where they were forged.

And that creaking noise you heard during the rest of  "Meet the Press"?  That was the sound of Both Siderist wagons being circled as all the Very Best People agreed that is was just terrible what Both Sides had done this election year:

Nicolle Wallace posts up a decent assessment of what's going on with her party:

NICOLLE WALLACE:  ... the real work, I think is on the Republican side to really go and understand why the base of our party selected him. They chose him over 16 other people. And if we try -- if he should come up short and we try to move on, business as usual, let's get back to our free trade agenda, you know and strong vote-- it'll be a disaster for a generation. I mean, the work at least, on the right, has to be in piecing back together this coalition.

But Tweety just has to jump in with "Sure, but if we lived in an alternate universe where everything was different then the other party might have done better, so Both Sides!"

CHRIS MATTHEWS:  I think that the Democrats have to listen, too. I mean, if this election goes as your polls showing it going with Hillary winning, there's still a huge minority of the country, almost 50-50 and probably more that would've voted for Trump if it weren't for Trump. His issues were powerful. He tapped into anger.

And now we are off to the races... (emphasis added):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: It was trade. It was uncontrolled immigration. Wars we probably shouldn't have fought. And he put it all together in this perfect storm of anger. And he addressed it. He didn't create it. I don't even know if he believes it, you know? The monkey typed Merry Christmas. I don't know. But the fact is the Democrats ought to recognize that they didn't win this argument. They didn't win the argument if they win the election. And they better be careful about that.

JOSE DIAZ-BALART: ... And I think that what we're seeing on the one side, a caudillo-type attitude and on the other side you have allegations or at least a lot of people who believe there's corruption and impunity. Those are things that we see in other countries. We shouldn't see in this country.

TOM BROKAW:   One other thing is, we're not talking about the monster in the closet. We're not talking about social media. What happens the day after? With all of the site out there who are dedicated and, in many instances, left and right to the destruction of the opposition, by whatever means necessary and they have an enormous reach...

CHUCK TODD:  We're going to see the "I" word no matter who wins, impeachment proceedings. I mean, we sort of laugh it off but they may begin no matter who wins, right Nicolle?

Anywhere on dial, any hour of the day, you can now find the paper-hangers of the quisling media cranking the Both Siderism/Blame the Democrats for Republican Madness corporate party line up to 11.

On "This Week With...Sorry, Christiane Amanpour Doesn't Work Here Anymore", Matt Dowd obediently doing the one and only thing he ever does:

DOWD: The two parties...The two parties have a problem. The two major political parties today, Donald Trump is likely to lose and lose badly, but that is not a huge victory for Hillary Clinton in the course of this race, because of how she's perceived by the American public.

On "Fareed Zakaria GPS", well, you know what's coming right?  (emphasis added)

("Wall Street Journal" columnist) BRET STEPHENS:  ... And I think what the real yearning in this country is centrist government, is for constructive, productive government. I think the best thing a Mrs. Clinton could do as president is work across the aisle with Paul Ryan, say, let's figure out what we can do. Let's try to marginalize the extreme factions in our party, whether it's the freedom caucus on one side or Elizabeth Warren on another. 

ZAKARIA: The problem is, you know, people say they want centrism but somehow it's the extremes that get elected and the extremes that make the noise and send the thousands of e-mails.

STEPHENS: If Hillary Clinton is elected, she will be a great president if she can break with this polarization in American politics and try to govern as her husband did with all of the prompts, that was, we remember that as a halcyon  period in American history of three, four percent growth, very low unemployment, a technological revolution, America at the top of the world. That was a period when America was unmistakably, undeniably great.

ZAKARIA: And it's also the period when the Republican Party tried to impeach a sitting president.

...

STEPHEN: You know, (inaudible) incredibly trivial next to how good the '90s were for the United States for all of the political --

(Author of 'Hillbilly Elegy') J.D. VANCE:  ... And I think that what either for Hillary Clinton to govern effectively or for Trump if he wins to govern effectively, they need to start with a massive dose of humility. The recognition that if they won, they won because the other party's candidate was so bad. And with that humility, hopefully, will come some measure of constructive government. Because without it, I agree with Bret that we're not going to have a very effective policy or politics in the next few years.

Even the one-time, gold-standard of serious, in-depth public interest programming for grownups -- "60 Minutes" -- felt compelled to turn an entire fucking segment over to Republican meal-worm Frank Luntz who discovered the shocking fact that we are a deeply divided country, and that all sides, both sides, every side, blah blah blah dee blah blah.

In the segment, Luntz identified "the 2000 election" as the moment everything started to go sideways on Both Sides.  What you will not hear Luntz talk about is how giddily the GOP jettisoned any pretense of the principles they had bellowed about just months earlier during the Clinton Administration -- judicial restraint, federalism, immediate investigation of anything that even hinted at presidential shenanigans, even from obviously crooked media sources -- in order to get Dubya appointed president.  Nor will you hear Luntz say one word about the fact that, for all of Dubya's criminal incompetence and outright war crimes, at no point was his administration ever seriously investigated Whitewater or Benghazi-style, nor was he impeached, nor did Democrats shut the government down out of pique as the Republicans had done under the reign of publicly disgraced con man and serial adulterer, Newton Leroy Gingrich.

And speaking of publicly disgraced con man and serial adulterer, Newton Leroy Gingrich, one of the very sad feelz that Frank Luntz is feelin' about all the sadz this year is the "deep-seated resentment" he sees in his focus groups.  What you will not hear Luntz mention is that he got his start in the business breeding that resentment by helping Newt Gingrich teach the GOP the virtues of preaching hate, paranoia and conspiracy-mongering on an industrial scale back in 1994.  Luntz made his name trawling the Republican political sewers and helping to bind all of that hate, paranoia and conspiracy-mongering right into the DNA of the Republican base voter and now, 20 years later, he looks Steve Croft straight in the eye and expresses his shock and sadness at the deep-seated resentment he sees in voters today.

Fuck you, Frankie!

And, of course, Steve Croft -- who has hired Luntz to do focus-group testing for CBS in the past -- is never going to ask him about any of this, because that is not how the game is played.  

Look, what's happening this year vis-a-vis "resentment" is actually pretty simple to understand: one side is openly and proudly nuts and the other side feels compelled to point this fact out at an ever-escalating volume because the media refuses to do so.

At which point that same, gutless weasel media copes with the incoming fire by doing the only thing it knows how to do -- upping the Both Siderist claptrap still further and turning every argument into  a Font War:  Sure, Trump says something incredibly racist and horrible and patently untrue using 77-point Railroad Font, but Hillary pointed out that what Trump said was incredibly racist and horrible and patently untrue also using 77-point Railroad Font.

See!  Both Sides are equally guilty of using a large font, which is why Murrica is so sick to death of this election!

But the cherry at the very ippy tippy top of this dung-heap had to be this communique from Ron Fournier who is lost somewhere so far up his own god-forsaken ass that all attempts at a rescue mission have been abandoned:

Comey has tried to be transparent.

None of this would have happened had @HillaryClinton been transparent.

This is all on her, not FBI. https://t.co/o8VsytzNtC

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) November 6, 2016

Once again, it's us versus the mole people and you can stop waiting for the cavalry because you are the cavalry.

Best of luck to us all.

Your pal today, tomorrow and the day after that,

 driftglass.