Dear Steve Gilliard

I know you passed away a little over ten years ago and probably have weightier afterlife-related matters to consider (like pinning down Tony Scalia while Muhammad Ali purple-nurples the shit out of him, or you, Gwen Ifill and Leonard Cohen swinging by whichever circle of Hell Tim LaHaye currently calls home dressed as Vedic gods) but I thought you would get a kick out of hearing how deeply fucked-in-the-head things have gotten in the past decade back here in the vale of tears.

Fucked-in-the-head in ways that I think you would find both bizarre and completely predictable.

First, the Bush Administration collapsed completely, and the Right reacted pretty much as you'd expect.  (Bush?  Who dat?  I'm an in-dee-pen-dant!)

But that's not the punch-line.

Then Democrats elected the first black president.  And then re-elected him.  He did a lot of good stuff and some not-so-good stuff and will go down in history as one of America's great presidents.

And the Right reacted exactly as you'd expect.

But that's not the punch-line either.

Republicans then nominated and elected noted New York real estate con man, conspiracy monger and all-around scumbag, Donald J. Trump, who is currently doing pretty much exactly what you would expect a pig-ignorant Republican man-baby to do when given more power than anyone on Earth: staffing his White House with halfwit relatives and compliant stooges, fucking up everything he touches and blaming "Fake News" for his historic run of failures.

President Stupid now appears almost exclusively on Fox News which, it turns out that, in addition to being an openly fascistic propaganda mill, has also been a sexual predator petting zoo for years.  It got so rampant that eventually the House of Murdoch had to pay both Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly more money than I will ever see in four lifetimes to go away and stop molesting the help.  But in America, for-profit-wingnut-hate-mongering is a growth industry, and mere months after having cashiered its two biggest sexual predators (and driven away a number of their most recognizable on-air female humanoids) no one is even talking about it anymore.  Now, as far as anyone can tell, Fox is being run by the rat that lives in Sean Hannity's big empty skull and tells him what to say.

In the wake of the scandal, Tucker Carlson replaced Megyn Kelly as Fox News' prime time"serious" journalist and the Persistent Vegetative Right (who are now their only viewers) barely noticed.

Yes, that Tucker Calrson:

Tucker, you lost.

No one likes you, a lot of people like Stewart. Get over it.

He told you what most people who are not your drinking buddies think: that you're a dick and what you do is a travesty to political discourse.

The cold, hard fact is that his show won awards for news, while people hate your show.

People find Jon Stewart, the comedian, far more credible than you, the professional pundit. Take the fucking hint. Your day is done, bow tie boy.

And now here's the punch-line.

Now that history has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the Left was right about the Right all along, the corporations who own the media's cameras and microphones and printing presses and Brookses and Todds have decided that our national political dialogue should largely to be limited to...

...Conservatives who have been on-board with every single Republican atrocity all along except the Ascension of Trump (the "NeverTrumpers" and the newly-minted Both Siderist "independents") and...

...Conservatives who have been on-board with every Republican atrocity all along including the Ascension of Trump (the rest of the Republican Party, Fox News and Hate Radio.)

The latter group have it easier, of course.  All they need to do is keep on doing what they have always done:  lie constantly, deny everything, keep the Pig People angry and dumb as fuck and toe the fucking party line.  So the real, cosmic punch-line to this story is to be found in the hilariously schizophrenic behavior of the former group who, to maintain their media cred, must now use exactly the same vocabulary to describe the GOP that got Liberals kicked to the curb not long ago while at the same time continuing to pretend that Liberals (who, let us repeat, were right about the Right all along) either do not exist at all, or are somehow equally awful and equally culpable for reasons they never get around to explaining.

It has gotten to the point where Jennifer Rubin -- yes that Jennifer Rubin (from Salon in 2012) --

In Jennifer Rubin’s world, a world where everything is Good News For Mitt Romney, this is a “debacle” for Obama. It may shock you to learn how much Jennifer Rubin admires Bill Clinton, or at least the conservative anti-Obama Bill Clinton that she has invented for the purposes of this post. “One wonders how Clinton feels as Obama repudiates the centrist vision that made Clinton the most successful Democratic president since Harry Truman,” she writes. (He feels OK enough about it to stump for Obama?)

This is my favorite part of the post, where Rubin somehow turns Clinton releasing a statement calling Romney dishonest into a confirmation that Clinton totally agrees with Romney’s attack.

-- is writing in the Washington Post about the "moral rot" of the GOP:

The GOP’s moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr. - The Washington Post https://t.co/dKJzGXAyDO

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) July 14, 2017

It has gotten to the point where Max Boot -- yes that Max Boot  (from The News Blog in 2006) --

Max Boot writes middle class war porn, Why would anyone take him seriously.

-- is now a Respected CNN and MSNBC Constributor who thinks that Mr. Rubin is the bee's knees.

.@JRubinBlogger nails it as usual. https://t.co/ZJ6DYmFsCH

— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) July 15, 2017

It has gotten to the point where Windsock Joe Scarborough -- yes that  Joe Scarborough -- has gone from boldly advising the GOP to Save The Party by blaming everything on it's incompetent leader long after it was far too late (from the WaPo in September of 2006) -- 

THE ADVICE ISSUE (REPUBLICAN EDITION)

Save Yourself, Blame Bush

By Joe Scarborough

Sunday, September 17, 2006; Page B01

I can't help but feel sorry for my old Republican friends in Congress who are fighting for their political lives. After all, it must be tough explaining to voters at their local Baptist church's Keep Congress Conservative Day that it was their party that took a $155 billion surplus and turned it into a record-setting $400 billion deficit.

How exactly does one convince the teeming masses that Republicans deserve to stay in power despite botching a war, doubling the national debt, keeping company with Jack Abramoff, fumbling the response to Hurricane Katrina, expanding the government at record rates, raising cronyism to an art form, playing poker with Duke Cunningham, isolating America and repeatedly electing Tom DeLay as their House majority leader?

How does a God-fearing Reagan Republican explain all that away?

Easy. Blame George W. Bush.

Escaping political death by attacking an unpopular president is hardly new -- especially since most endangered politicians have the loyalty of a starving billy goat. But this is Dubya's Washington, where the White House has pushed around, bullied and betrayed GOP lawmakers for years.

-- to declaring himself to be an "independent" and boldly warning the GOP that it's incompetent leader was Killing The Party (from the very same WaPo in July of 2017) -- 

Trump is killing the Republican Party

-- and hoping that President Stupid will finally end the Party of Jefferson Davis.

Just kidding!

As a newly-minted "independent", Scarborough is now contractually obligated to blame all of America's problems on the K'rupt Duopoly, which will be swept aside once political parties miraculously vanish from the Earth and enlightened independent thinkers like, say, Joe Scarborough finally rise to power on the basis of his ability to rip-off the Liberal critique of his Republican Party and turn it into a steaming, Both Siderist WaPo turd:

Political historians will one day view Donald Trump as a historical anomaly. But the wreckage visited of this man will break the Republican Party into pieces — and lead to the election of independent thinkers no longer tethered to the tired dogmas of the polarized past. When that day mercifully arrives, the two-party duopoly that has strangled American politics for almost two centuries will finally come to an end. And Washington just may begin to work again.

It is all so funny and so terribly sad and, as I mentioned, fucked-in-the-head in ways I think you would find both bizarre and completely predictable.

Best regards,

Your pal, driftglass