Sunday Morning Comin' Down

At the end of all things, some sold out:

Jeff Van Drew: I’m so proud to be associated with you. You truly represent what news media should be about pic.twitter.com/maT3hkRd99

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) December 22, 2019

Some tested the limits of just how low a Republican could go:

#KremlinKevin seems to be trending. https://t.co/CyGdcRV8Yu

— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) December 23, 2019

Some dealt with the complete collapse of their ideology by staying drunk, going on teevee and  blabbing extraordinarily stupid shit:

Another reason why MTP has become a laughingstock, if not entirely irrelevant.#Tuneout

— D. Lowther (@dlowther715) December 23, 2019

Some didn't need to steep in a bucket of gin to go on teevee and blab extraordinarily stupid shit:

WATCH: Former Democratic Senator @clairecmc says the "Senate is no longer what it was."

"People of this country are gonna have to be the ones politically to put pressure on this dysfunction and say ... we want you to quit the partisan food fight." pic.twitter.com/SOQjT7eQHE

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) December 22, 2019

And the crowned prince of Both Siderism remained haughtily unrepentant:

While I disagree with how the arrogant Left has weaponize the phrase “false equivalence” to satisfy its bias, ⁦@DLeonhardt⁩ has an important column here. Because any bias needs to be rooted out.

Except: A relentless bias for truth https://t.co/L6opBtbVIC

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) December 23, 2019

At the end of all things there is no longer any doubt that the Left has been right about the Right and the American political press all along.  And to drive that point home with the subtlety of a 20 lb sledgehammer (and to save myself some typing) here is a reprise of my Christmas Eve Sunday Morning Comin' Down column from 2007.   Back when Tim "Pumkinhead" Russert walked the Earth.  Long before Donald Trump was a twinkle in Steve Bannon's eye and before the Republican Party crucified Barack Obama for saving the global economy and pass RomneyCare being black.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Poinsettias Every Damned Where” Edition.

Because while they can’t yet get away with Huckabeing a cross on every surface like they trowel a fat schmear of flag into every Exciting War Graphic, the networks want you to know that Jebus luurves them so much He buries them in eye-stabbingly red Blood O’ Christ Forget Me Nots on His Special Day.

Flags and Crosses, which actually leads us right into “Meet the Press” .

When I heard that Punkin Haid was going to grill Ru Paul, well I was pretty excited.

I mean Tiny Timmuh --

(“Mr. Dickens, in ‘A Christmas Carole’ you said, and I quote, ‘God bless us every one'.
And yet as in the case of some of your more infamous villains – Fagin, for example, or Uriah Heep -- it seems unlikely that you really want God to bless them at all.
So, sir, which is it!”)

-- versus a big black transvestite?

Now that’s some fucking Must See (pun alert! pun alert!) TV!

Sadly and truer to form, Timmuh went with a smaller, older, whiter, nuttier, less gender-bending guest.

Ron Paul: Get rid of the IRS. We lived just fine – until 1913 – without an income tax.

Timmuh: That would leave us a trillion dollars short.

Paul: Then we should stop being the world’s policeman.

Timmuh: How many troops do we have overseas?

Paul: I dunno.

Timmuh: 572,000 troops overseas. Ha! I looked-ed it up!

Paul: We’ve had troops in Korea since I was in high school.

Timmuh: So you think Israel wants us to bomb Iran?

Paul: Yes.

Timmuh: Prove it.

Paul: Fuck you. We’ve been dragging our dick through the Middle East for fifty years. Destabilizing their governments. Overthrowing them. Installing dictators. Propping up and arming the shit out of any pocket edition Mussolini who would kill who we told them to kill and give us cheap oil. How would you feel if that was being done to us?

Timmuh: So it’s our fault and not al Quaeda?

Gotta love the utter predictability of Timmuh’s fatheaded, binary, zero sum world view.

Paul: If you step in the snake pit and they bite you, whose fault is it? They bit you, sure, but they wouldn’t have if you hadn’t have stepped into the pit.

Paul: I like the Dubya who ran in 2000, but his foreign policy changed immediately. At the first Cabinet meeting, way before 9/11. At his first meeting he was running up and down the aisles yelling “When are we gonna attack Iraq?” Kicking the back of Condi’s chair, going “Arewethereyet?Arewethereyet?Arewethereyet?”

Paul: War eliminates liberties. The War on Drugs is ridiculous. Out of control.

And then Teh Crazy came out to play…

Paul: Lincoln shouldn’t have gone to war. A useless Civil War. Shoulda just bought all the slaves and released them. And slavery would have just vanished.

Because there is nothing that the Magic of the Markets cannot cure!


On “Face the Nation”

Bob Schieffer: Is it true that you think Dubya is a power-drunk fucknozzle?

Mike Huckabee: Ah lurrve the Preznit. Always have. But I’m not running for Dubya’s third term. We need to be honest about what isn’t working.

Bob Schieffer: What about that damn cross?

Mike Huckabee: Maybe – hehehe – it was – hehehe – an...act of God? Or maybe it was…an accident. Yeah. I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money to shoot the commercial again. My Secular Bookshelf wasn’t back from the carpenters yet. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. It wasn’t my fault, I swear to God!

Schieffer: Are you running for Preznit of Jesusland?

Careful, Mike! It’s a trap!

Huckabee: No. For all America.

Whew! Good thing he kept his cool.

This is me, not watching any more of “Face the Nation”


On “This Week”

Nothing interesting here, except ABC debuted its new KarmaCam 2007 ™ , which alleges to do what revelations about medical records, financials and how close to Jebus you sat in the High School cafeteria (Mike Huckabee -- “Dude! He was in my band!”) can’t do; show you the state of a candidate’s soul:

Here, for example, Rudy [Giuliani]' Soul is shown here charming the pants right off of the MSM… (No video available)

The only matter of interest to me was this brief interplay between George Will, George Stephanopoulos and E J Dionne (video at Crooks & Liars here)

Will: The most important fact in Washington this year was the Senate rule that, in effect, we now have a supermajority requirement. It’s not in the Constitution, but noting important happens without 60 Senators.
…

Dionne: …The point is, Republicans can go out an brag that “We had a great successes!” What are their successes? Well they stopped expanding child health care to 10 million children. Are you going to brag about that?

Small things can be revealing. (The) President at the end of this week stopped 700 million dollars out of Medcaid from going to help reimburse school districts for things like from transporting kids to immunization or physical therapy. So…3.6 billion over five years. They’re going to brag about that?

Stephanopoulos: All they’ll say though is that President Bush and Republicans in Congress will “restrict spending”. Which will work.

Dionne: Against 12 billion a month in Iraq?

These are the moments that for me perfectly capture the utter failure of the Sunday shows in sum, because these are moments -- each and every week -- when the Mouse Circus routinely and conspicuously fails to do what real journalism does: Ask the next damn question.

Ask the hard, vital, follow-up question.

Ask the “why?” behind the commonplace wisdom of “everybody knows”.

So, to the uninitiated, Mr. Will, without diverting us into an arcane discussion about the rules of the Senate, what exactly was it that happened “this year” that suddenly makes a super-majority a “requirement” when this has never before in history been the case?

Because, when they were in the majority, I distinctly remember Republicans being on the teevee machine about every five minutes helpfully reminding the American people that their stuff deserved “An Up Or Down Vote” and that a filibuster was worse than six Hitlers!

And now? One year later?

These same people filibuster everything.

These same people are now willing to hold the military, the elderly, the sick and the poor hostage. Willing to let them suffer. Let them die.

Why?

E.J. Dionne lays out a compelling case that the same President who pissed away our surpluses and is burying us in debt, who only vetoed one bill in six years, who pisses away 12 billion dollars a month in his failed war in Iraq, is the now the same President who vetoes virtually everything he touches, and is more than happy to play politics with the lives of American children over a sum that would not fund his Iraqi Debacle for two days?

Stephanopoulos rebuts not one of the facts, but only with: “All they’ll say though is that President Bush and Republicans in Congress will ‘restrict spending’. Which will work.”

OK, but why, George? Why will it work? On whom will it work?

Because this is the place where the conversation should begin, not end.

This is the spot by the side of the road where a real journalist would pop the hood on American politics and take a long, hard look at why the vehicle isn’t running anymore.

But that will never happen, because under the hood they would find the works are mostly being fouled by the 27%-ers – that quarter of the American public that are unsalvageable ignorant, irredeemably hateful, ambulatory human sewage – and a spineless media that categorically refuse to discuss the ramifications of that plain and terrifying fact.


“Fox News Sunday” reports that

The Surge is Working! So everyone should STFU now.

Also we might bring some troops home.

Someday.

Might not.

Depends on stuff.

We’re examining various conditions.

And then were gonna decide stuff.

Wallace (Asking Gen. Petraeus): But didn’t you say we needed to hand off this mess to an Iraqi government.

Petraeus: They passed a pension law. And when they come back from their long, long, long vacation we think they’ll do other stuff.

Wallace: Yay!

Wallace: Why does the media hate America?

Wallace: You smell good. Are you gonna run for Preznit?

Then came one of the scariest people in America. Pastor Neverfrown Joel Osteen. And when you step back and look at what Osteen is doing, you realize he is absolutely perfect for Fox News; he is to Christianity exactly what Fox is to Journalism.

Because Osteen is not a Christian at all: He’s Americas leading NeoFosterite and head of a nearly-full-blown Church of the New Revelation.

From Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” -- New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons (1961):

"A devout agnostic, Jubal rated all religions, from the animism of Kalahari Bushmen to the most intellectualized faith, as equal. But emotionally he disliked some more than others and the Church of the New Revelation set his teeth on edge. The Fosterites' flat-footed claim to gnosis through a direct line to Heaven, their arrogant intolerance, their football-rally and sales-convention services - these depressed him... If God existed... and if He wanted to be worshipped... then it seemed wildly unlikely that a God potent to shape galaxies would be swayed by the whoop-te-do the Fosterites offered as 'worship.'

And

"'...My point is that Foster's New Revelation is sweetness-and-light as scripture goes. Bishop Digby's Patron is a good Joe; He wants people to be happy--happy on Earth plus eternal bliss in Heaven. He doesn't expect you to chastise the flesh. Oh no! This is the giant-economy package. If you like to drink and gamble and dance and wench--come to church and do it under holy auspices. Do it with your conscience free. Have fun at it! Get happy!'

Right before our eyes, the Right is hollowing out the bones and teeth and heart and soul of Christianity and injection-molding a wholly new, Corporate Compatible faith into its old skin. A new, feelygoody, market-tested faith manufactured to some very disturbing specifications.

A comfortable, Jebus-For-Dummies Doctor Phil Pablumocracy Twinkie Church with spongy yellow God’s Glory on the outside, and the Soft, White, Gooey Glucose of Christ on the Inside.

Gone is the cross. Gone are the actual words of the actual Christ. Gone is any notion of anguish, pain or redemption. Or compassion. Or the narrow path.

Gone is the guy Kanye West is singing about here -- 

-- or any mention of the real, ragged, flawed, terrified, noble, bleeding, tragic humanity that needs Him.

Instead we have a Republican-Friendly Power of Positive Prosperity faith, where if you just thought happier thoughts, all of your unsightly problems, debts, pounds, inches and, presumably, melanin would just melt, melt, melt away.

But uh-oh if you have bad thoughts. If you have the Seeds of Doubt…

Wallace: I must confess, I too have the Seeds of Doubt.

Yeah, you sure wouldn’t want that in a journalist…

Wallace: Some people say you’re a fucking huckster. Just a motivational speaker.

Joel Osteen: I don’t wanna beat people down. Don’t wanna make ‘em feel bad.

Wallace: You don’t talk about sin. You talk about a Prosperity Doctrine.

Osteen: Evangelizing is not my main goal.

Wallace: People say your new book doesn’t mention God, or that you’re a preacher. So you’re saying that anybody can be a preacher?

Osteen: See me smiling? I never stop smiling ever.

Wallace: Should voters consider a candidate’s faith in this Presidential season?

So when exactly isn’t it a “Presidential season” anymore Chris?

Wallace: So what do you make of Mike Huckabee?

Osteen: Ah like him. Ah think he’s just super, ooper doper.

Wallace: And Mitt?

Osteen: Ahm not one to go into the little details of his faith. Ah don’t hear nothin’ that would stop me from votin’ for him if I chose to do that.

The 27%-ers thrive because there is Crazy Big Money in creating an alternate universe built on a media that consistently lies to them about nature of the world, and a church that consistently lies to them about nature of their souls.

And on Fox Sunday, that is exactly what the pig people got: the News Without Truth interviewing the Christ Without Suffering.

It made me physically ill to watch.


“The Chris Matthews Show”

Shorter Dan Rather’s Animatronic Corpse: Despite to horrible, hateful, murderous bilge she spews, I somehow don’t really believe Ann Coulter is anti-Semitic.

Shorter Andy Sullivan: As a gay conservative let me say that I’m angry that the party against which I have campaigned most of my life is Guilty!Guilty!Guilty! of not showing more foresight and bravery on the War than I ever did.

driftglass: To give Sully credit, he is now openly wishing for a Huckabee victory so that his Glorious Imaginary Geh-Friendly Confederacy can finally purge itself of the Christopaths in an epochal defeat. What Sully is far too gutless to admit, however, is

A) If the Dems ever did unilaterally cut off funding for Iraq, they would be slaughtered like hogs by virtually every Wingnut and MSM media outet – print, broadcast, internet – every day from now until the end of time. That the “We Coulda Won in Veet-Nam” Conservative Revisionista crap that still poisons any honest discussion of foreign policy would seem as sweet as a V-J day kiss in Time Square compared to the brutal, hysterical shellacking they would take if they pulled the plug on George Bush’s War.

Which is not to say they shouldn’t do it, because they should. But for Sully to pretend that the price they would pay wouldn’t be staggering – that the same “Wag The Dog” pinheads who came down like the Tunguska Meteor on Clinton when he stuck his toe into Afghanistan wouldn’t take to the streets, armed and by the million, the minute Dems cut their War Nads off – is delusional.

And

B) That without its 27%-ers – without its Christopaths and Wannabe Klansmen -- there is no Republican Party.

I mean, now that anyone with a conscience and a cerebellum has been drive out, what would be left behind after they’re gone?

Just a few hundred millionaires who think all tax is theft and Scrooge was a Liberal. A mercenary army. A handful a self-loathing gays. A battery of AM radio..

Hey, wait a minute? Where have I heard this before?

…
9 Coulters Hating
8 Years of Failing
7 Years of Lying
6 Years of' Warring
Countless Pervy Flings!
4 Blue Dog Dems
3 Chicken Hawks
2 Filthy Roves

and a Drunken Fuckup in the White House.


And God bless us.

Every one.

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