Sunday Morning Comin' Down

I used to devote more time and viscera deconstructing the Weekend Gasbag Cavalcade back when there was a glimmer of hope that if enough of us documented and published the catastrophic failures of our political media over and over and over again, it might change their collective behavior.

I no longer believe that.

Clearly, their contemptable collective behavior is an organizational feature and not a bug, and therefore unfixable until it becomes unbearably more painful for the men and women who control our corporate media to change their ways than to maintain the status quo.  I still take note of the weekly crimes against journalism and the vipers and pettyfoggers who commit them, but now it is more with an eye towards the future.  Just a dime-store Josephus documenting who we are and why this is happening to us as our country is systematically gutted by forces beyond my control.  And I think I write a pretty honest stick, but this Sunday I can't sum things up any better than @51Renee on the Twitter machine:

Trump having a meltdown today.

Jill Stein having a meltdown today.

Bernie snapping at Chuck Todd today.

Hillary Clinton is laughing her ass off.

She tried to tell you.

#StillWithHer

Yeah, that's about where we're at.

Also a few, very special Presidents' Day Fuck Yous going out to a few very special Beltway media collaborators who never, ever want to find themselves across the table from me with a camera rolling.

First, Fuck You, John Kasich  Y'know, the "Good" Republican who is running so fucking scared from the degenerates who own his Party and their enablers who own the media that he cannot form his mouth the say the word "Republicans" when asked a direct question about who exactly is blocking any meaningful progress on gun control legislation of any kind:

BASH: But when it comes to Congress, you were a member of Congress. Do you think that it's just dysfunction and ineptitude, or do you think it's because they're actually scared of the political consequences from important groups like the NRA?

Instead, he gasses on about the goll durn "Congress" up there in goll durn "Washington D.C." and advises people to just give up on the federal government entirely because of the goll durn "politicians" and do what he did: get a lil' group together with a friend of his and his friend's cousin and then there's Floyd and some of the boys down ta' the barber shop who's always up for whatever, and ya get together and maybe propose somethin' to the town council!

KASICH: ... Where we have to effect this, I believe, is at the local level and the statehouse, because you can have greater access to politicians who serve in the state legislature, in -- a county commissioner, in a city council.

Before ending up exactly where every one of these sniveling Republican cowards always ends up.

KASICH: ... And, look, I'm not calling for some outright ban. I'm talking about small steps that can be taken that can be effective. And the Congress ought to do it.

I just don't -- I -- I don't have any confidence in them. I don't think most Americans do. Nobody's supporting them any more on both sides. They're both broken.

Then Fuck You Maureen Dowd, who took the same "Both Sides/All Sides/Everyone is to blame" playbook and ran with it --

Then I gave up. If the sight of slaughtered angels did not dent the nation’s conscience, could anything?...

But we didn’t care...

In our ongoing angst about our national identity — if we weren’t John Wayne anymore, who were we? — there had been a terrible tacit judgment made: America would accept periodic human sacrifices to the trigger gods in the interest of upholding this bizarre notion that the Second Amendment is inviolate or even really threatened.

We can’t even summon the energy to break the chokehold that the N.R.A. has on Republicans in Congress.

When societies try to protect a malevolent status quo, they become warped.

The most chilling sign of this is when people look the other way as the most vulnerable members of society are preyed on.

America shrugs.

-- pausing only briefly to pat herself on the back for that time she blamed Barack Obama. 

And I wrote in disgust about President Barack Obama failing to marshal the L.B.J. mojo to push through a gun control bill after Sandy Hook even though he had 90 percent of Americans on his side and a Democratic Senate.

Because, see, President Obama didn't use his Magic Green Lantern powers to change the cold, dead hearts of Republican scumbags like Maureen Dowd's brother. 

Republicans who are are "meh" about all those "slaughtered angels" because Freedumb!  

Republicans who are delighted with the permanent damage President Stupid is doing to this country.  

Republicans who elected the seditious thugs who dynamited everything the Obama Administration tried to do just because they fucking hated the first black president.   From Time Magazine, August of 2012:

TIME just published “The Party of No,” an article adapted from my new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. It reveals some of my reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.” 

And finally, a Very Special Presidents' Day Fuck You to Respected NBC Contributor and America's Most Lubricated Conservative Barfly, Peggy Noonan --

-- for very nearly making it to the bathroom before vomiting half-digested wingnut talking points about school shootings all over the sink, the walls, the rug and the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal:

The family blew up—divorce, unwed childbearing. Fatherless sons. Fatherless daughters, too. Poor children with no one to love them. The internet flourished. Porn proliferated. Drugs, legal and illegal. Violent videogames, in which nameless people are eliminated and spattered all over the screen. (The Columbine shooters loved and might have been addicted to “Doom.”) The abortion regime settled in, with its fierce, endless yet somehow casual talk about the right to end a life. An increasingly violent entertainment culture—low, hypersexualized, full of anomie and weirdness, allergic to meaning and depth. The old longing for integration gave way to a culture of accusation—you are a supremacist, a misogynist, you are guilty of privilege and defined by your color and class, we don’t let your sort speak here.

Poor Peggers.  Other than the Wall Street Journal...and The New York Times...and MSNBC...and NBC...and ABC...and the lecture circuit...and book deals..and putting words in the mouths of Republican presidents...and myriad radio appearances...and a standing invitation on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show...

...no one will let her sort speak here!

Have another drink, Peggy.

Hell, have a thousand.

Behold, a Tip Jar!