Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

It's probably time to throttle back on this Sunday Thing I do.

Not that scrutinizing the Mouse Circus is not a, well, “noble” calling it ain’t, but necessary it is, for the simple fact that for a big, wide slab of America, the Sunday Puppet Show is all the political dialiogue they will ever see or hear.

Sad as it is, it is the about only place that the Great Wad of Rush taint-sniffers might ever get the slightest inkling that there is some other form of thought outside of perpetually regurgitated talking points of the Great Conservative Fart Rebreathing Bell Jar. It is also where new GOP propaganda is often catapulted, new trial balloons launched and new presidential aspirations publicly pole-danced.

I mean, what is Lindsay Graham these days but the Honorable Senator from MSNCB?

What is John McCain at this point but one thong and one boom/shake chorus of “Me So Horny” away from being a member in good standing of the International Union of Sex Workers.

It is the most plebian of forums, and based on the time of each program and each’s proximity to the others, the most clearly market-driven of political gathers during any given week. So like radioactive emissions, I believe the Mouse Circus must be monitored, but now that Crooks and Liars is in the business of Sunday recapitulation, and even Atrios regularly has multiple happy endings over the Sunday Scrum, there seems to be little reason to draw deep from the adjective well for this tiny publication to cover a wee corner of a waterfront that is now a-bustle with A-Lister setting up shop.

But I suppose there may be a little I can add…

...every now and then.

Here and there.

Bennett made a mad ass of himself on Meet the Press, but really, how novel is that anymore? He lumbered his peeved manatee act onto the Sunday boards where he came across like he always does; loud, gassy and professionally outraged. Demanding answers from the other panelists like he was the substitute host on Mike Savage’s Hate Radio atrocity, screening calls and controlling the mike instead of one-of-four guests on a panel.

And the others – even, eventually, that Liberal firebrand, William Safire – just rolled their eyes and kept on talking in semi-reasonable tones as Bennett flopped and whined, a belligerent fool trying to commandeer the format.

Leading to the same genus of question that rattles around in my head more and more these days.

Who is it, specifically, behind-the-scenes , that keeps giving these slabs of bile minutes of network air?

Who, exactly, continues to give these shitheels second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth chances?

And who was it, specifically, that hands the keys to a major Sunday programs to a weak, partisan bint like Mrs. Alan Greenspan?

Who, by name, believes that packing a panel with one crusading journalist, a scrivener for the WSJ, Spiro Agnew’s speechwriter and Bill Bennett achieves anything that anyone could call balance?

Off to one horizon there is the supplicant media, and off darkening the other is a waterboned Congress. Sleazing, rigging, sliming and lying their way to power, desperate to keep the Bush junta in control, and desperate to frame the +60% of the American public that now clearly sees them for the criminals, freaks and traitors that they are as the fringe.

People that rally to the orc army of anti-Christian troglodytes like Falwell…and dare to call us godless.

Neckless haters who suckle their lies and infotainment from Hannity and Hume’s toxic teats …and dare call us irrational.

The basement veal and doublewide warriors who pack the pockets of talentless, keening rodent like Coulter…and dare to call us angry,

Ironically, if they had just bothered to listen to anyone who was trying to warn them before they drove the ship of State off the fucking cliff, a lot of us wouldn’t be angry.

And if they had anything like a cortex functional enough to actually learn -- just fucking ONCE -- that their tragic, stupid, lethal mistakes aren’t a trivial byproduct of your ideology, but the inevitable and deliberate consequences of that ideology, there would be a chance for rapprochement.

But the more I talk and listen to Modern Conservatives, the more painfully clear it becomes that we cannot coexist in any normal sense. We will never find common ground – nor should we try – with people who side with fascists and openly work for our extinction.

Point to virtually any Bush policy and you point to a reeking disaster. Not a mere misunderstanding or difference in nuance or emphasis, but a genuine disaster. This White House has been a series of catastrophes, for any one of which the GOP would have long ago smashed in the door of the Oval Office and demanded the resignation, hide, ears and tail of any President who had presided over it.

Provided that President was a Democrat.

But point not to just one or two debacles this President has wrought, but to the collective ruin to our treasury, our future, our reputation, or moral authority, out Constitution, our Gulf Coast, our military, our educational system, our environment, our language, our identity…and Republicans yawn.

They smirk.

They giggle.

They pooh-pooh it all as not so bad.

These people have been doing the cultural equivalent of forcing Jello shots of Ebola Virus down Liberty’s throat for the last 20 years, and in the last six have upped the dosage to include Hanta and Avian Flu chasers. And now that we are bleeding freely from eye and asshole, they continue pouring their poison into the mouth of our dying nation, sniping that we need to Stay The Course or things might get worse.

For these people, it’s gloves off all the time from now on.

And for the people who keep standing with them, the question from now on is simply this; are you retarded, evil or just plain stoopid?

Because you can be a good American or a good Republican, but in the Age of Dubya, you can no longer be both.

Which led back to Friday’s Charlie Rose Show (I know. I shouldn’t.) And this decidedly weird interplay that begins around the 38:00 minute mark, wherein Norman Ornstein and (American Enterprise Institute) and Thomas Mann (Brookings Institution) and their book, “The Broken Branch”.

Apparently a rousing tale of a prostrate Congress, completely AWOL from its critical oversight duties at precisely the same time that we have a President who behaves more imperially and has grabbed up more unchecked power than any Administration in modern history.

So what was remarkable about this offering?

That the word “Republican” goes virtually unmentioned during the entire piece.

“…Congress has been supine in face of this in the last few years.”

And Rose asks the obvious, “How has this happened?”

“It didn’t begin,” Mann answers, “With the Republican Congress and the Bush White House…”

No, it began “decades ago.” When “the Parties” became much more ideologically-driven.

The political world has grown more “polarized”. Attracting more people who are not interested in pursuing ideological agendas than governing.

Which is funny-but-not-"ha ha"-funny that none on these esteemed gents seemd to have noticed that the GOP mantra for the last 20 years has been “The Government Is The Problem”.

The "Fuck the poor" Republicans.

Who are also the "Fuck the weak" Republicans.

And the "Fuck the sick" Republicans.

The "Fuck public education" Republicans.

The "Fuck any sense of a common good" Republicans.

The "Fuck Everyone But Me" Republicans.

Who are also Proud, God Fearin' Christians, one and all.

The annihilation of the federal government has been the End towards which every Republican Means has been unabashedly bent. From the Southern Strategy, to the chloroforming of the Fairness Doctrine by Reagan, Scalia and Bork, to the immediate rise thereafter of Hate Radio, to the milita movement, to the murderous embrace of the Religious Right, to Newt’s Little Red Book giving GOP office-seekers detailed instruction to call Democrats “weak” and “cowardly” and “traitors” at every opportunity, one Party has pioneered hate, ignorance and divisiveness as weapons to achieve their despicable ends.

And they have succeeded: we are now governed to our eternal shame by a feebleminded fratboy Dauphin, his thug Regent and a Republican courtier/eunuch Congress who rubberstamps the Boy King’s every whim and bodily function as if it were Holy Writ.

In other words, the Republicans have EXACTLY the government they have always lusted after and it is an unmitigated failure. And again, ever, and always, no one in the Establishment can form their mouths to admit the obvious; that Conservatives are disease from which we are suffering.

Conservativism is the nightmare from which we must awake.

But no, to obey the kabuki forms of modern media, the closest one is allowed to come to correctly diagnosing both the carcinoma and the cure is to always divide blame equally, regardless of the facts.

Even though Mann readily admits that when the GOP seized Congress in ’94, they pushed the President “aggressively” even “to the point of impeachment”, suddenly with Dubya you have the Republican Party – from Denny Hastert on down – saying quite openly that their job is “to pass the President’s agenda”, he nonetheless is self-blinded-to-the-point-of-comical in his refusal to note DNA common to each step down this road to tyranny.

That Republicans want power, but not to govern.

That they loathe the Constitution as an impediment on the road to Corporate Jesusland…except when it can be perverted into a bludgeon to beat a Centrist Democrat bloody.

But Mann, Ornstein and Rose all must wear their Collar’s of Obedience, so the million pound dead elephant sprawled across the kitchen table and reeking up the joint must remain unacknowledged.

So there is no Party differentiation. The “members of Congress” are all equally wrong. It is “politicians” who are all equally bad.

“Individual members” are occasionally willing to stand up, but “ideology” trumps institutional responsibility.

It is “Congress” and not the “Republican Congress” who let Dubya get away with his signing statement obscenity.

It is “Congress” and not the “Republican Congress” who refuse to hold serious hearings about anything related to the multitude of crimes of George W. Bush.

That if the Dems retake the Congress, they might return to the bad behavior the exhibited while they were in the Majority.

You mean like impeaching Eisenhower? And Reagan? And GW the First?

Or the way Dems obediently fell into line behind Carter? His unopposed run in the 1980 primary? And the Party’s slavish loyalty to Bill Clinton?

Rod Serling famously had his teleplay “Noon on Doomsday” eviscerated by gutless teevee editors. It was a very powerful, fictional retelling of the lynching of Emmet Till, which Serling was told could not be depicted as “black against white.”

(All citations are from “Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone”. The deeply flawed bio of Serling which, God help me, for some weird reason I actually own and have read.)

So he changed it…to Jewish pawnbroker who is killed by a “neurotic malcontent”.

Then word got back to the White Citizens Council – that racist heart of the modern segregationist South -- that uppity white agitators were gonna put on a show that depicted their murderous, racist institutions in a less-than-glowing light.

They threatened a boycott, so again the script was changed to an “unidentifiable foreigner” being killed by a “decent kid gone momentarily wrong."

Before that – and directly on this point -- Serling created a drama about the U.S. Senate entitled “The Arena”. It was similarly gutted when studio executives refused to allow his characters to voice any lines that advocated a particular point of view or made them identifiable Left or Right.

In the end he created his “Twilight Zone", saying "I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say."

This has been going on a long, long time kids, and in the world of art -- which I love -- this kind of censorship is grotesque.

But in the world of real politics, where there are real people dying behind the immoral policies of a particular Party and ideology, it is obscene and criminally irresponsible not to name names and allocate cause and effect honestly.

And we can no longer wait for men like Messer’s Ornstein and Mann to find some political T-Zone fantasy construct within whose sheltering bower it becomes safe to actually tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

So help you Rod.