Sunday Morning Party Line

"Vultures, Vultures Everywhere" Edition.

Seeing as how "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" decided to fizz up its ratings by pulling out a chair at the Big Media Table for noted bile-spewing gorgon, Ann Coulter this weekend --

KARL: But, Ann -- the reaction of students at a place like Berkeley can't surprise you given some of the things you have said.

COULTER: Oh, please.

-- I decided that instead of a long break-down of the individual offenses against journalism committed at the Gasbag Cavalcade, I would do a little thought experimenting.  I tried to imagine what I could say in a very short letter to my younger self back at the dawn of the age of blogging about what has happened during the intervening 12 years. 

Back when I was writing such as this...

Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- April 10, 2005:

...

CBS - McCain. His constituents ask him “Why are you guys always fighting?” He opines a few seconds later, “I think both parties...”

Fuck you, McCain. And as regards Dear Old Tom DeLay and his reeking-so-bad-it-makes-Baby-Jesus-cry scandals, McCain opines further, "I'll take him at his word" and "I'm not is a position to comment on DeLay."

So...Big John, how exactly did you vote on the Clinton Impeachment again? I believe part of what you said went something like...this,” Although I may admit to failures in my private life, I have at all times, and to the best of my ability, kept faith with every oath I have ever sworn to this country. I have known some men who kept that faith at the cost of their lives. I cannot--not in deference to public opinion, or for political considerations, or for the sake of comity and friendship--I cannot agree to expect less from the President.”

(From Bill Shakespeare who was, most definitely, not making the rounds this Sunday Morning:

He was my friend, faithful and just to me;

But Brutus says he was ambitious,

And Brutus is an honorable man.)

And then McCain has a hearty laugh about how effectively Bush cornholed him in 2000.

Hehehe! Lookit the funny draft dodgy creep who ran a fixed-bayonet attack right at genuine war heroes. Impugning their service at war and in POW camps, slandering their good names, during the period when Der Bush was apparently too knee-walking drunk to bother to show up for the cushy job his rich daddy poached for him. Letting some poorer, smarter, low-born thrall go off to the jungles and suck up bullets.

Man! Bush-dick must taste like Belgian Chocolate! So yummy, that you just can't get it out of your mouth!

McCain again: “It shouldn't be partisan...” and fond recollection of the good old days of “Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill...”

The best single-sentence summary I could devise to tell that barefoot blogger with cheek of tan (me, back in 2005) about That Which Is To Come. is that every political trend he sees around him will come to full, grotesque fruition by 2017.

Air America is as dead as disco, while Conservative Hate Radio continues to completely dominate the airwaves from sea to shining sea.

Cable news has gone from barely palatable to a hot, steaming load of supersized Fail.  It is dotted here and there with a tiny islands of rational conversation, which are being rapidly swallowed in a toxic ooze of screaming frauds and madmen.

Cable news has ousted most of their Liberals -- people who committed the unpardonable sin of being right about the Right all along -- and is hiring every wingnut with a media profile they can lay their hands on.  MSNBC now has an entire ad campaign based on how effectively it has sold out it's Liberal viewers.  Radio Crackpot Charlie Sykes is now a Respected MSNBC Contributor.   Infamous Wingnut Hitman Rick Wilson is also now a Respected MSNBC Contributor.  Professional Republican Turd Polisher Michael Steele, is also now a Respected MSNBC Contributor.

Hate Radio Crackpot Hugh Hewitt is also now a Respected MSNBC contributor and is on his way to having his own MSNBC show. 

And professional Fox News petroglyph, Greta Van Sustern, already has her own show on MSNBC.

It's all part of the plan.

And speaking of Fox News...

...once again it turned out that Liberals were right about the Right all along.  Fox News really is nothing but a shitpile of racism and sexual predation engineered to deliver massive, amygdala-jolting doses of lies and conspiracies to the tiny brains of the Pig People.  But Fox News is now so deeply wired into the American political system that even spilling the grotesque details of Roger Ailes' fecal bordello into the public square has not put a crack in the paranoid, fact-free information bubble in which the Republican base lives.

The disease has outgrown it's Petri dish.

And speaking of the Republican Party...

...it has continued and accelerated its long, disastrous trajectory into the darkest kind of Bircher/Know-Nothing insanity.  In 2008, the Democrats nominated the brilliant, young, charismatic Barack Obama as their standard-bearer.  He won, and began his administration staring down the barrel the worst economic calamity in 75 years, and the Iraq Debacle, which Bush Administration had promised would be quick and cheap and turned into the worst American foreign policy disaster in modern history.  Also 40 million Americans were completely without health insurance, and millions more lived on the verge of bankruptcy-by-broken-leg.

Although he won as a Democrat, for eight years, President Obama attempted to govern as an Eisenhower Republican, and spent more time trying to reach across the aisle than he did courting his own base.  This failed completely because, as we later learned, the Republican Party had committed itself to a program of complete, lockstep opposition of every single thing the Obama Administration proposed.   For eight years they spat in his face, relentlessly lied about his faith, his family and his birthplace, openly baring their racist fangs at him and roaring their hatred at his very existence.

You might be wondering how the these same people -- who had spent the previous eight years loudly backing the Worst President in History to the fucking hilt and calling "traitor" on anyone who did not defer obediently to Commander Cuckoobananas -- could possibly get away with instantly and completely reversing every single principle they claimed so very loudly to believe.

Well, you're not going to believe it, but they got away with it by putting on the worst disguise in the  history of the world -- a tricorn-hat wearing shoutycrackers carrying signs depicting Barack Obama as an African witch doctor -- and declaring... 

...wait for it...

...wait for it...

...that they were all "independents" who had never even heard of George W. Bush.

Yay!

And they got away with it because our corporate media let them get away with it.

And speaking of our shitty media....

...it coped with the collapse of the Bush Administration by leaning hard into it's most profitable and enduring fairy tale -- High Broderism.  Aad upon that rock built the the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism, 

And for eight years, the media blamed Both Sides for the gridlock,  Both Sides for the racism.  Both Sides for the mess.  Sure, Republicans might be mindless killbots who would rather burn the government to the ground rather than compromise one iota on anything...

...but  Barack Obama is also equally to blame because he refused to used the Green Lantern superpowers which are granted to every president under Article  II, Sector 7G, Area 51 of the United States constitution to magically transform the Republican Party into the exact opposite of everything they are (See the 1,000 hand-wringing "Why Oh Why Won't Obama Lead?" articles.)

And speaking of the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism...

...despite being catastrophically wrong about everything, David Brooks is still a Respected Public Intellectual, who has come to believe that The Establishment will enfold the Trump Administration and render it essentially harmless and ineffectual.

Oh, did I mention that Donald J. Trump was elected president?  

Sorry.  I kinda buried the lede.

Yeah, that racist orange fire-demon con-man and Birther Conspiracy Monger Number One beat a field of 5,000 other Republicans to win the nomination and them went on to win the electoral college in 2016 but lose the popular vote.  Bigly.  Did he attempt to hide his bigotry, ignorance, fraud and sexual predation?  Oh hell no.  He reveled in it, and the Pig People love him for it.  And cable news gave him over a billion (yes, "billion" with a "b") dollars worth of free advertising.  And the Russians hacked our election.  And the head of the FBI directly intervened to cripple Hillary Clinton's campaign just days before the election.

But thanks to the unbreakable dogma of the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism, the very last thing any media outlet want to talk about is exactly how fucked-in-the-head Trump voters are and exactly how  they got to be that way.

And speaking of the Donald J. Trump...

...Andrew Sullivan declared that he was giving up "blogging" and leaving the field of battle entirely.   So of course he now has a weekly bloggish column in New York Magazine which he uses to write meandering exercises in magical thinking...defending Charles Murray...taking his bottomless contempt for Hillary Clinton out for a walk.. and generally reliving his 1990s glory days while demonstrating that, after all this time, he really doesn't know the first fucking thing about his adopted country:

...

All the right’s political power, we can now see, depended on being in permanent opposition, and never having to actually implement something. Their tax cuts for the very wealthy are tone-deaf; their resuscitation of the Laffer curve surreal. They’ve got nothing on health care but a return to the highly unpopular status quo ante. And they are caught between Trump’s desire to borrow even more to finance his tax cuts and the GOP’s resolute insistence throughout the Obama years that the debt was an existential threat. It’s quite amazing to watch this unfold and unravel in real time.

And here’s the thing: My suspicion is that if Clinton had become president, the fever would not have broken at all; it would have intensified. Her incompetence and indecision would have given the GOP even more political oxygen; a Republican House would have stymied her even more effectively than it did Obama; her unfavorables would have gone through the roof; and it could have been an ugly death spiral for the Democrats...

And speaking of Conservatives who are always wrong, who never shut the fuck up, who can apparently never be banished from the realms of men, and keep showing up on our teevees for no explicable reason...

...Newt Gingrich is still a thing.  Over the last 12 years, America's most enduring grifting Republican scumbag has been recovered from the ask heap of history, brushed off and given a new lease on life by the media more times than I can count.  He is now a also Respected Informal Adviser and spokesman for President Stupid.  

Bloody Bill Kristol, who was a punchline in 2005, is now a Respected ABC News Contributor.  He also somehow appears at-will on MSNBC.  And he has gotten his creepy son-in-law a front-row seat at the wingnut welfare trough.   No one has ever stepped forward to explain how this could be.

Matthew Dowd, the chief architecture of the 2004 Bush campaign, is now an "independent" and a deacon in the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism.  He is also ABC News' Respected Chief Political Analyst.  

Michael Gerson.  David Frum.  Ari Fleicher.   Peggy Noonan.   Joe Scarborough.  

In fact, it is fair to say that while being a Liberal who was right about the Right all along remains a media career-killer, pretty much every Conservative who lashed their career to mast of the Failed Bush Administration has emerged from that debacle unscathed and fully employed.

And speaking of Ann Coulter...