Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Special “Sinister Negroes and Their Devil Music Made Me Do It!” edition.


On Fox News. Republlican Bullshit. Episode 118: The Hunkering. In which Lindsay Graham sends the signal loud and clear that the GOP is not going to even pretend to listen to reason or facts any more.

They are settling into their trenches and, whatever the reality on the ground they’re just going lob out the GOP talking points of “Timetables, timelines, enemy roadmap, micromanagement” over and over and over and over again.

Chris Wallace was actually a little snippy with Grahamy this morning, interrupting him and reminding him that the Preznit has already set all kinds of benchmarks for the Iraqi government and they have blown them off. That civilian causalities are down in Baghdad, but way up in the countryside. That American casualties are going sharply upwards. That a string of car bombs have been going off daily and that the sanctum sanctorum of the Green Zone has been lethally penetrated in a way that cannot be misunderstood.

Wallace: So, Grahamy where’s the fuckin progress?

Graham: When I was there I saw that some sheiks have joined together to oppose al-Qaeda. And a buncha other stuff. Lemonade sales are up! Ponies! Also I saw a bunny. Also there were a couple of trials that weren’t lynchings.

And then he broke into song:

I bought Dubya's fiction (but we'll call it a War Plan)
(Surge City, here we come)
You know it's not gonna work, but we'll give it a freidman
(Surge City, here we come)
Well, it ain't got prayer and'll destroy the army
But still I'm gonna go along with President Smarmy


And we're goin' to Surge City, even though it's hundreds to one
You know we're goin' to Surge City, gonna have some fun
Ya, we're goin' to Surge City, even though it's hundreds to one
You know we're goin' to Surge City, gonna have some fun, now

Two tours for every boy
...

From now until autumn expect nothing from the Right but trench warfare and slander; it’s gonna be an ugly summer.

And speaking of ugly, on Face the Nation, wacky neighbor Dick Cheney stopped to lie for about 20 minutes, and repeatedly impugn the patriotism and honor of anyone who disagreed with his lies.

We learned that he has made no mistakes. He has never been wrong. He has never lied or misrepresented anything. That being “inconsistent” in one’s opinion is worse than nine Hitlers, even when “inconsistent” really means

1) Lending one’s conditional support to this Administration based on the long, sad parade of lies they trotted out as incontrovertible and absolute fact. And then,

2) Amending or revoking one’s support when one finds out one has been both massively lied to, and the war that was launched on the basis of those lies has been massively and criminally botched.

So by Dead-End Dick’s estimation, once a three card monte huckster fleeces you out of twenty bucks on the “el”, you are somehow forever morally obligated to continue to take the same train, play that same rigged game and endure being skinned out of your rent money by the same criminal, in the same way, day after day, year after year.

Forever.

Or until Mr. Devious Flimflamski declares “Victory” and deigns to release you from the bargain.

Cheney calmly explained that everything he has ever said was either accurate given what he knew at the time…or will be vindicated in the long “sweep of history”.

Dick Cheney was a very odd choice to be sent abroad to make the Administration’s case.

He is certainly the most loathed and mistrusted politician in a Party and Administation that is already red-lining its lack of credibility into Nixon territory. Someone that a broad consensus of our nation’s citizens seem to have concluded irrevocably is a truly evil and probably insane old prick who needs to be rotting the rest of his despicable days away in a 6X6 cell behind three feet of concrete and steel and a cordon of Marine guards.

Then again, at this point who else do the Bushies have left to Surge onto the Mouse Circus that won’t get slapped to atoms?

Finally, on Meet the Press, an extended meditation on what happens when the Bad Thing gets caught in the light reflecting off of Dom Imus’ colossal ego.

Allow me to explain.

Tolstoy said: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Which is about half right.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the razory maw of the beast that bores its way though the bones of every malignantly dysfunctional family has the same name.

The Bad Thing.

The Bad Thing is the light-stealing singularity around which the malignantly dysfunctional family orbits. It is incest or serial abuse. It is violent alcoholism. Or murder. Or madness. Or evil. It is a terrorizing monster that demands that the outward face of the family always be molded plastic conformist perfection to mask its inner rot and pollution.

It is the evil that prowls around the kitchen table. That plants extra high hedges so outsiders do not see. A beast that that will flog a child for not smiling for the neighbors and performing as artificially and flawlessly as a horse being put through dressage. It is a smothering bedroom horror, as intimate and ruthless as the Stasi.

And since the Bad Thing strives above all to be invisible, the way you know you are within its event horizon is by measuring the behavior of its stooges and enablers when you find yourself in their presence. You do this by presenting them with irrefutable evidence of the reality of the Bad Thing and watching their reactions.

Their increasingly desperate, increasingly bizarre reactions.

Because once you become a servant of the Bad Thing, once you become dependent on the Bad Thing for your livelihood, you will do and say anything -- anything -- to keep from having to face the true villainy of what it is you have come to serve, and what it is you have allowed yourself to become to serve it.

So it was this Sunday on Meet the Press when Gwen Ifill – for whom I have not had a lot of love in the past – and Eugene Robinson (who I like a lot) delivered a truth-laden and withering lesson on the provenance and prevalence of hatespeech in the media. The casual viciousness of it, and the conspicuous fact that so many of the Media Elite have been so utterly complicit in letting things get so bad.

And Ms. Ifill did not deliver her measured and (for network teevee) harsh jeremiad in a vacuum. She delivered it sitting across from the whitest, pastiest, third-rate, soft-toned, media-bestriding apologist for Conservativism in America today: David Fucking Brooks.

Bobo: We have to remember that a lot of this is comedy? And other people like Howard Stern and Bill Mahr have to look out…

Ifill: Doesn’t comedy have to be funny?

John Harwood: What about Borat? Some people say he’s s stitch. But some people say…

Ifill: Oh fuck you. We know where the line is. We know where the offense is. But the best way to dilute this argument/discussion is to keep saying “What about this” and “What about that?”

Bobo: Borat is cruel too. He is cruel to people who are bad on teevee.

Bobo serves the Bad Thing and so Bobo is horribly uncomfortable with the dark corners into which the Imus tempest might blow his little pastel wingnut outrigger. He tried constantly and desperately to steer the conversation away from those scary rocks out into friendlier waters.

Out to a discussion of “the larger picture.”

“The public culture”.

To keep widening the lens until everything is as gray and flat and featureless as his prose.

Yes, kids, you are hearing right: the champions of lock-and-load, lock-em-up-forever, no-mealymouth-excuses-about-how-hard-your-life-has-been Personal Responsibility Conservativism (so long as we’re just talking about muggers and pickpocket and car thieves) and are now desperately and loudly trumpeting their new truth:

That…wait for it…waaaait for it…Society Is To Blame.

That the coarsening of the culture is to blame.

We have now lived long enough to see the Rich, Powerful White People’s Brigade sprint for shelter in the loving arms of “We Were Victims of Circumstances!”

And who is to blame for the plight of po’, po’, wealthy, Caucasian Elites who get caught using their positions of privilege and power to slam and slander the weak and powerless?

Why, those awful Negroes of course. And their Devil Jungle Music! And probably Bill Clinton too, although we’re not yet sure exactly how to string him up for this one just yet.

Ifill: Judge the man by his actions.

Ifill: There has been radio silence about this. Newsweek, who sends all of their reporters on that show, were completely silent over this. Until his show was cancelled. Then and only then did they announce that their people would no longer be treading the Imus boards.

Ifill: The reason it took so long for the media elite to speak up is that they were so deeply complicit.

Robinson: That’s what hurt so much. That these were the best and brightest. These were not the baggy pants kids.

It was, on the whole, a good discussion, but three huge points were mostly overlooked.

First, however lacerating language may be, there is a completely different tenor when using language to take on the powerful, the hateful, the bigoted and the enemies of civil society...and using that language to either premeditatedly or gratuitously beat on the weak, the powerless, the noble, the honorable, the poor, the sick, the lame, the halt, etc.

It is a categorically different thing for the landed and the privileged to thug on “the least of these”, and they fucking well know it, which is why the Right has had to pour so much time and money over the decades remarketing their whole mythology of victimhood.

That symphony of lies lifted wholesale from the dregs of the Confederacy and the White Supremacist movement to explain to the faithful why their leadership caste of rich, tubby, white bigots and their orc legions are really The Oppressed.

That entire encyclopedia of mendacity devoted to explaining why Bible-pounding, Christ-defiling demagogues with their own satellite networks, teevee stations, coast-to-coast radio empires, publishing houses, marketing firms, think tanks, congressmen, senators, embedded journalists, President, political Party, newspapers, tax-free rivers of revenue, Constitutionally-protected citadels, and a dozen doggie-doors straight into the heart of the White House...are really a horribly put-upon minority. Are really being subjugated by the Sekrit Liberal Elite Media Cabals working to destroy America by aiding terrorists and working with atheist scientists to take away our freedom by faking up a “Global Warming” crisis. The entire operations is run by man-hating feminists, abortionists and obscure assistant professors, accessorized and sexualized by queers, with muscle provided by Dirty Commie Labor Unions, soundtrack provided by Welfare Queens and funding by George Soros.

Second, the panel almost entirely avoided noticing that for twenty years the Right has made its political bones openly trafficking in the Bad Thing.

That the Conservative movement owes its electoral successes entirely to its efficient cultivation of the rawest, ugliest and most virulent hatespeech imaginable, and the harvesting of its poison fruits at election time. That far from paying the kind of steep cultural price these weak children and neocon stalking horses of the MSM suddenly seem giddily anxious to charge to everyone’s account equally regardless of rank, privilege or context (in the name of Holy “Fairness”), the Right has been lavishly rewarded for adopting the language, habits and attitudes of racists, sexists, homophobes and theocrats.

Third, the embrace of White Supremacist ideological infrastructure dressed up in Biblical language was not an accident. This was done by the Right willingly, carefully and by design. For twenty years the Right has pioneered the use of 1,000 decibel demonization, slander and lies as a matter of tactical necessity. Their leaders and elite media apologist like David Brooks know it, but for twenty years they have stayed silent regarding the simple fact that the entire Ponsi Scheme of Conservativism is built on hateful words and despicable ideas.

Which means that without Limbaugh and Coulter…

Without Hannity and Hume…

Without Will and Gingrich…

Without DeLay and Drudge…

Without Coulter and Malkin…

Without O’Reilly and Savage…

Without Dobson and Cheney…

Without Goldberg and Lott…

Without Falwell and Robertson…

Without Schafly and Tancredo…

Without all the rest of that loud, vile, Democracy-loathing freak-show...

There. Is. No. Republican. Party.

Period.

There. Is. No. Conservative. Movement.

Period.

Without their legion of demagogues, all of those cozy think tanks and glorious corporate welfare giveaways and high value-added wars and plush teevee pundit gigs would vanish in a puff of stink and a flutter of Confederate flags.

They are The Bad Thing and so, for twenty years, The Bad Thing has remained frantically unacknowledged and deafeningly unheard by the David Brookses of the world.

But now the Bad Thing has crawled onto a national stage and take a huge shit under a big spotlight, which is why the Media Bobos are freaked out.

Because the god-fearing, Party of Personal Responsibility Conservatives are terrified that the general public will finally notice that they are the ones who bear the primary responsibility for premeditatedly eradicated civil discourse in our society.

Terrified of finally being forced to submit to that paternity test.