Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part Deux

Neither Sunday nor morning.

File this under: Big Russ’ Kid is a moron. Film at 11.

While sprinting past a teevee machine I happened to catch Charlie Rose interviewing Tim Russert about his book.

Apparently – and this is breaking news -- Dads are...good.

So the terr’ists haven’t won.

Yet.

Yes, I broke my own resolution (resolutionette, really) not to watch Charlie Rose, made after I saw him smarm and sweat all over a panoply of conservatives and noecons, swallowing every crumb of their dung-bread with a smile…and then repeatedly try to punk Paul Krugman. (Every time Krugman pointed out another, indisputable factual basis to believe the GOP is trying to implement a modern feudal state, Rose would hang a frown, begin by saying in his best, pre-pubscent squeak, “C’mon! You don’t really believe that!” and then launch into another patented 48-minute Rose Paean to Duke and/or Tom Friedman and/or Capitalism and/or Andy Grove.)

And, yes, it was disconcerting to see two grown men (one recently back from successful pig-valve replacement surgery; the other just plain swine from snout to hoof) circling each other like paunchy, aging lemurs, each trying to give the other the most obsequious taint-laving.

Anyhoo it was mostly harmless, and my thoughts turned to my old man, now dead and gone more than a few years, and my ambivalent feelings about him. That sort of thing. Mostly harmless, because when Fat Tim swiveled his vast squash away from the paternal to opine on the political, it got ugly.

Crockery was thrown. With intent. Parental lineages were savaged. Words were spoken that can never be taken back.

At least that’s what was happening at my undisclosed location as I halted my rocket-rollerblading between tasks just to see…

…to see if what I thought he was going to say and do was, in fact, exactly what he said and did. And if Charlie Rose would confront Russert’s indefatigable idiocy with anything other than his typically unctuous goo-goo eyes and meandering molasses river of deferential queries.

To see if he would execute anything more journalisty than that complex, mutual fake-reporter groping which lies somewhere between a Loyal Order of Cocktail Weiner Journalist Secret handshake and Rose’s typically reflexive Kung Fu Grip of a reach-around.

Shoulda known better; I could have gotten way more unpredicted and candid revelations on a solid diet of reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” than I got watching these two, weird hairs growing smack out the of center of the American middlebrow feign wisdom and fling their love-poo back and forth at each other.

And the thing was, if Rose were at all interested in journalisming -- comparing delusion to data and asking honest questions about where they don’t match up -- it would have would have required him to put forth effort no more taxing than sitting and listening (something for which, admittedly, he has little patience.) No effort involved. No research required. No charts and prior quotes for him crack staff to pore over and compare.

None of that stuff.

All he had to do was listen, and even then with only the half-an-ear I was allocating to the job.

Because after shoveling shill and the saccharine about his book and bravely allocuting in front of God ‘n everybody about why it is the Most Perfect Fucking Father’s Day Gift Ever!!, Russert went on to decry The horror! The horror! of Washington, D.C. – that tawdry town from whose toxic teats Russert

suckles a cozy living.

It was a chapter-and-verse lesson in that cheapest and most despicable of Friedmaneque deceits: the positing of completely false equivalences, and then denouncing the fake dichotomy you just invented.

Russert carefully explained -- over and over and over again, in case the Dear Leader was watching and there was any doubt as to Russert’s perfect fealty -- that the town sure was a poisonous stink-hole. That rancor and divisiveness was running hip-deep through the streets.

Oh how he moaned for the good old days of “Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey” first debating each other and then “going out for a cuppa coffee or something stronger”.

Or Johnson and Dirksen.

“Or Reagan and Tip O’Neill!” Rose piped up helpfully, lest anyone think that he’s dim-witted or not paying attention (even though, by plunged Rosily into a “So how’s your Mom doing?” aside, he made it excruciatingly obvious that A) he had not actually read Mr. Punkin’s Opus, and, B) his staff had not bothered to tell him that Russert’s mother had passed away a few months ago.)

On and on they went, these professional mourners keening loudly away at the funeral of compromise and civil discourse, and Russert only was absolutely certain about one thing: That both sides are equally to blame.

Surprise!

He went on quite the long, jazzy riff about Democrats and Republicans both being equally at fault for this sudden cataract of public animosity.

A pox on both your houses!

Both equally villainous.

Equally sinning.

Both Parties, so perfectly and equipoisedly balanced over the Blamechasm, that even with the most scrupulous analysis, carried out with instruments far more sensitive than the most sophisticated quark-detectors known to science, one could never really say with certainty who was less virtuous and more vitriolic than whom.

It was all just a dirty fucking shame.

And then, 183 seconds later, these barefoot men with cheeks a whappin’ plunged into the cold, testicle-shrinking waters of Speculating About Election Strategery.

So, Tim, what do you think the GOP strategy for victory is going to be this year?

And Russert pulls his chair in like a man warming himself at a friendly campfire and practically rubbed his hands together.

Well, see, Karl Rove is going to go back the the base. Gonna paint the Dems as America-hatin’ dupes. Weak on defense. Soft on terrorism. It's going to get all kindsa personal and vicious.

Just like it was in '04.

Just like it was in '02.

(Just like it was in '00. Just like the entire Clinton Presidency.)

Russert gleefully explained how the GOP would once once again dump poison into the well of public discourse to win an election, not two minutes after decrying the coarseness of public rhetoric and then assigning 50% of the blame to Democrats.

And neither he nor Rose ever even noticed that they had both severed their duplicity arteries on camera and were bleeding their own hypocrisy all over their expensive suits.

Once upon a time I lived near the “el”. It was a awhile ago. The train roared past like thundering clockwork, seemingly right though the tiny bedroom, and I thought I’d never get used to it.

I was wrong.

The day came when I would ask “What noise?” when visitors would ask what that noise was?

When pausing while talking on the phone to let the “el” rumble past was just…normal.

And this, politically, is the failure – the fatal failure – of men like Russert.

Men who have listened to the steadily growing roar of hate and divisiveness from the Right -- a hate and divisiveness which is now entirely automatic and on which they are now entirely dependent -- and cannot or will not hear it for what it is.

To whom Limbaugh and Hannity, DeLay and O’Reilly, Hume and Falwell have just become white noise.

White Supremacist Noise.

Or don't you remember this golden oldie from last year’s Social Security debate?


Or this guy?


Who brought you this guy?



These are the handmaidens of the Southern Strategy: Rove, Bush, Atwater, Reagan, Robertson, Falwell, Dobson and all the rest. Each the diseased whelpling of those who have gone before them.

Each believing that courting the thugs and racists who voted for this guy...


and look back on this age

with wistful, weepy nostalgia is the key to the mythic Permanent Republican Majority.

Each inheriting a legacy of rage and hate, each nursing it carefully along, handing it off.

Braying it forward.

And every year it gets easier to call a feminist a “feminazi”. A Liberal “America-hating”. A homosexual an “abomination”. A scientist a Godless “tree-hugger”.

To accept the swiftboating of patriots as normal, and to vote sadistic, damaged drunks and war criminals into office.

And every year Russert has to yell “What noise?” a little more loudly to be heard over the shrieking from inside the walls of Mordor that gets ever more deafening, more reckless and more hysterical year after year after year.

So let me make this a little clearer, Tim, and see if a different pitch or tone can improve your hearing.

How would you feel if I stood in the public square and called Big Russ a coward at 100,000 decibels?

Called him a gutless, ball-less, godless coward. A dupe for the enemies of the country. A betrayer who celebrates the failure of America and dances on the graves of her fallen children.

Big Russ worships death. He enjoys seeing babies die. He gets off killing the unborn and euthenizing helpless women in hospital beds.

Big Russ hates work. He is a lazy parasite who wants to scam a living off of the hard labor of others. He wants to see the economy fail.

The military fail.

America fail.

He is a man without honor, and a fool to boot.

Do I have your attention now, Tim? Because this is how our fathers are treated by the Right.

These is how our mothers are vilified every day for fighting for the rights of working people. This is how our wives and husbands and slurred for demanding voting rights be respected. This is how our sisters are slapped for trying to make heath care and a decent education affordable for every American, and how our brothers are mocked for trying to stop a global climate change catastrophe.

How our kids are sneered at for working for peace.

This is how our kin by the millions are casually slandered in the press and in the pulpit, by men and women who are not fit to wipe their asses.

Every. Single. Fucking. Day.

And this has been going on for decades, Tim.

For decades, people have been offhandedly calling our mothers whores and our fathers cowards, for no reason other than pandering to the lowest impulses of their base is the only way they can get elected. And for thirty years we tried to combat the rising tide of barbarism and hate from the Right with civility and compromise -- two virtues the Right openly despises.

And for all of the time, under the color of "objectivity", people like Russert have stood studiously mute.

Conspicuously silent...so long as the mortar fire was all coming from Right, and the Left rolled over and took it.

Ah, but let a Lefty come off the mat. Let a Lefty start landing punches. Then and ONLY then do stooges like Russert all of a sudden develop a keen interest in keeping the party polite.

Well fuck that.

When the GOP falls back in love with privacy and the Constitution and fiscal discipline and runs Coulter and Dobson and the rest of the demagogues out of the Party on matching rails, then come to me about a return to gentile gentle genital genteel Mayberry politics. But until then go pee up a rope. And don’t kid yourself, Russert: this is why you’re seen as a dupe and an ass by the Left, to be watched for the same entertainment value people get from renting “Reefer Madness”.

Because you can actually bemoan the divisiveness and loss of comity in public discourse in one breathe, and gloat over the Republican strategy based entirely on divisiveness and revulsion in the next. And never once draw the blindingly obvious conclusion that there is perhaps a causal relationship between the fact that one side tanks up its electoral engine exclusively on fury and Fundamentalism...and the fact that the air is full of stinking clouds of blind hatred and religious intolerance.

So while Ann Coulter is a ranting cancer of a thing, she is also simply a grotesque. Pure poison in a large-bore needle to be sure, and anyone who gives her teevee time for anything other than a public flaying is a reeking idiot, coward or collaborator, but essentially she’s just 67 stringy pounds of stroke jerky for the no-necks and skinheads; the wannabe stormtroopers who can’t get their petite General Lees to stand up, salute and surrender without a blonde Death’s Head shrieking hateporn at them.

You know; the “base”.

Russert, in the other hand, has his own shows on cable and commercial teevee, which makes him much more insidious.

And much more in need of serious hickory time behind the woodshed with Big Russ teaching him what honor actually means.