Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

In which, now that I’ve decided to put together a book, I worry briefly about the whole “fuck” thing, right up until Tom Brokaw and David Gregory decide to generously use their baton-passing moment on the “Meet the Press” platform to preemptively blurb my upcoming opus.

Brokaw: …everyone is paying attention now, in a way I can’t wemembew since waaay back in Nineteen and Sixty-Eight. We are in vewy, vewy difficult times and people want to participate in their own destiny. And of course when I say “participate”, I mean sit back passively and watch as we here in the Stenographic Division of the corporate media give hot rock massages to our fellow employees over in the Politics Division. And so it makes Sunday Morning across all these networks – and especially here on “Meet the Press” – ah, ah, critically important time in American life , isn’t that right teevee’s David Gregory?

Gregory then gives one of the finest Sarah Palin, Pageant-Word-Salad responses I’ve heard in, well, at least several hours:

I think the country is in such a difficult place right now, such a challenging place, people are so engaged… And we just saw it, and what an important interview with the President-elect of the United States on Sunday Morning in a way, on this program, uniquely, can provide insights and answers and ask tough question. To explore the nature of leadership. In Washington and the country and the world. And to hold leaders accountable. As Tim always said to me, as you’ve said to me…

Brokaw: …this show is especially important beyond the Potomac, beyond the Hudson Rover in New York City. uhhhh, across the country. I have been very struck by how important this broadcast is to people as a regular appointment to them.

Gregory then sledgehammers home how indispensably vital the Mouse Circus is to “the people” by presenting difficult issues so that “they can understand it, they can digest it, and they can make it part of their own decision-making and opinion-making in their own lives.”

Translation:

To: Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman of the Board and CEO, General Electric

Dear Mr. Immelt,

Despite what you may have heard from certain Dirty Fucking Hippies quadrants, the poor benighted savages of “Nebraska”, “Colo-Radoh”, “Funk’s Grove”, “Six Flags” and the rest of the largely-unexplored interior of the American continent who buy GE light-bulbs, microwaves and electricity still think we’re relevant, and still believe the thought-pudding we trowel into their heads are actually their own ideas and opinions.

Please don’t fire us!

UR doin it rite!

Love,

Dave and Tom

But ain’t that also just the sad fucking truth?

*Damn, I said it again*

A long time ago, my blogfather and hero -- the late Steve Gilliard -- asked me why I was wasting my fucking time spending my time and talent vivisecting the Mouse Circus. And the simple truth of it was and is that millions of perfectly nice people really go to do their week's political opinion shopping at the Mouse Circus.

That those opinions were more and more turning out to be lethally toxic formulations concocted by Karl Rove in some Neocon Chiba City lab at the behest of his Tessier-Ashpool plutocrat paymasters that were, years after maddening year, going entirely unchallenged by any of Sunday Morning’s overpaid haircuts.

That what I wrote three years ago is as true now as ever:

Left Blogylvania tracks the Sunday Mouse Circus like the mineshaft canary that it is. This puppet show where trial balloons are floated and talking points run around the track is now almost immediately sighted for range and distance by giants like Crooks & Liars and then shelled to dust. This beetle-riddled tree where hacks like McCain and Lieberman nest and preen and regurgitate their smirky horseshit is now routinely used for target practice...

Earlier on MTP, President-elect Obama said “Turns out, premising your economy on 'Greed is Good' and 'What’s in it for me?' isn’t good for anyone. And that spreading the benefits of the economy more equitably means that everyone does better.”

Which is rational and correct, but almost wholly lacking in entertainment value.

However later, just before they blurbed my book-to-be, Brokaw introduced former-understudy-now-Stah! David Gregory as the new Chief Flapjack Flipper at the Mouse Circus with such delightfully awkward, tooth-gritting hostage-reading-a-forced-confession formality that one could not help but wonder what was really going on

in his head.


Gregory, in case you are unfamiliar with his oeuvre, is the one playing “Dawn #2” to Karl Rove’s “Tony Orlando” here:



Dance, baby, dance.



On “Face the Nation”

Senator’s Chris Dodd, D-Central Casting., and Jeff Sessions, R-Dyspepsia talk like adults about the economy and the auto industry.

Then, Tommy Friedman -- dressed in full Sans-a-belt Ninja – unspools his vast,
sticky,
short-circuiting-robot-handed-Mr.-Wiggles-electric bugaloo-gesticulating

superannuated,
h-y-p-e-r-a-n-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-e-d
wisdom across the land.


Because the combination of an international banking collapse and massive terror attacks in India just screams

“Show Me A Boob Trick”, don’t you think?


On “Fox News Sunday” as history’s righteous judgment closes over the Worst Administration Ever like a mile-deep mudslide, there she was – Condi Rice -- desperately dragging those goalposts down field one more time. Frantically shaking the Great Etch-a-Sketch of Reality as if it were still the glory days of 2004 when one arched “How dare you question the Dear Leader!?” eyebrow from the White House was enough to still the pens and silence the questions of every mother’s son and daughter in the Big Dollar Media, leaving only a ragged chorus of Dirty Fucking Hippies out on the fringe screaming “You’re being lied to” onto the great abyss where the free press used to be.

Rice: [Iraq] Sure, we can go back now and argue over who did what, who got shit wrong, who outdid who in blood-and-treason points, but that would only lead to war crimes trials, the public humiliation of incompetent apparatchiks like me, and a long-overdue cleansing of the Bush regime’s reeking cesspit of lies and perfidy not solve anything.

It was all “intelligence failure”.

Rice: We have now reformed the system by which we gather information.

Translation: Comrade Cheney not longer has the keys to the shredder, and we’ve taken away the special edition “Fourth Branch O’ Government” Crayons he used to cross out “there are no fucking weapons” and write in “Saddam = 11 Hitlers who have sharks with frikkin' lasers beams on their heads” when the intel wasn’t sufficiently pro-bomb-the-crap-out-of-everything..

Rice: I still think that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein will be a Net Teh Awesome -- because we now have a young democracy. A multiethnic, multiparty, multiorgasmic, multichannel, polymorphously perverse, multiconfessional Iraq.

Multiconfessional?

noun multiconfessional state; multiconfessional states, pl. A country, usually of a multiethnic population, which allows worship of any form of God…

Whatever.

Rice: Iraq is a “trade up”...

Rice: Murderous dictator...

Rice: Invaded his neighbors...

Rice: Used chemical weapons...

It was, in other words, the 1000th tired rerun of every other relentless “catapult the propaganda” operetta which Wallace, for the 1000th time, lets her jabber vehemently out virtually uninterrupted.

Later, Republican Richard Shelby was asked whether or not the GOP would filibuster the Detroit-based American auto industry into oblivion for the benefit of the Confederacy-based Asian auto industry for which he works.

Shelby: Ah thinks we need to debate it and that’s what filibuster is all about. Christmas is a’comin’ and people want to get home.

Wallace: So you’re going to hold Congress hostage?

Levin: Every country that makes cars gives loans to their auto companies.

As regards the billions in unfettered cash already fecklessly thrown at the banking industry, Chris Wallace asks Democrat Carl Levin: Gonna make them grovel a little bit?

Levin: I don’t want anyone to grovel. I want them to prove up and show that this will help people who are losing their homes, small business people. We made the auto industry do it and rightly so, and now the bankers need to do it.

Maybe working for the Murdoch Empire has something to do with Wallace not being able to comprehend the difference between groveling and doing your damn job.

UPDATE: Make that "the Murdoch/Cheney Empire" and a big to h/t Nicole Belle @ "Crooks & Liars" for spotlighting this sweet ThinkProgess audio grab of Wallace on The Mike Gallagher Show:

WALLACE: Let me ask you this, did the Vice President say to you, “thank you so much for defending the president and yes I’m going to be giving you a special exit interview in a couple of weeks?”

GALLAGHER: Did he say all that to you?

WALLACE: Yes.

On “This Week”

Condi Rice continued her “Resume-Builder Final Farewell Victory Grand Tour-Alooza 2008 Fest”, again talking up the “The intelligence problems” of September 11th, and that given what they knew, “The Intelligence didn’t permit any dissent” in the Bush White House.

driftglass: The biggest intelligence failure of 9/11 was a bint named Condoleezza “No one could have anticipated” Rice.

Rice: Before we invaded Iraq, there was a worldwide consensus that Saddam Hussein had bad, scary weapons.

driftglass: Worldwide?! Wow! You mean the Philippines? Argentina? All 22 members of the Polish national intelligence service? Guam? Burkina Faso? All of the countries who learned about Iraq by reading Judith Miller’s regurgitation of Dick Cheney’s lies in the New York Times?

Rice: You don’t have that luxury. You can sit here and play mind games, but 2003 was a post-9/11 world.

OK, you shut up and go away now.


Then, after last week's exciting installment of “Three Conservative and one Donna Brazile”, the “This Week” panel bravely follows up with “Three Conservatives and one E.J. Dionne”, with George Will reprising the role of "Angry Old Man", and Peggy Noonan playing the part of “Bizarrely Affected Pile of Lumber”.



Lastly, with topics like “When does Obama lose his new car smell?” ”The Chris Matthews Show”


continues its inexorable descent into the goofball speculation depths of



Bill Swerski’s Superfandom.




Next week, Matthews will be asking his team of crack reporters...



Where is Joe Biden hiding his secret map to Atlantis?

Could Obama outwrestle an 11-foot, nunchuck-wielding Jesus?

And, if Bill Clinton had a time machine, would he risk cosmic catastrophe and alter the course of the Civil War by giving AK-47s to William Tecumseh Sherman just so, 100 years later, Marilyn Monroe could marry Cassius Clay and give birth to a daughter which he – Bill Clinton – could have sex with when she grew up and became a hot Clinton White House intern?


Later I caught the last 20 minutes of “Galaxy Quest” in which credulous aliens get themselves into deep, deep trouble by mistaking overpaid actors in a lame teevee science fiction series for real heroes with real answers.

Please, David Gregory

You are our last hope!

Probably a lesson in there somewhere.