Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Virtual Particles.

From the collapsing probability cloud of the Mouse Circus, there congealed this prototypically absurd exchange between Senator Dick Durbin (D-driftglass’ state) and Newt Gingrich on the damage the existence of Guantanamo Bay has done and continues to do to our international reputation.

Which of course sailed right on by

the host of "Meet the Press".

Durbin: I just gave it to you: Major Matthew Alexander, who interrogated the al-Qaeda suspects in Iraq. And it was his conclusion that half of them had been recruited and were fighting, trying to kill Americans because of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
...

Gingrich: Let me say, first of all, there were over 550,000 troops who served in Iraq. I'm sure you can find one to agree with you. The fact is the 3,100 Americans who were killed on 9/11 were killed before there was a Guantanamo. The recruits who were going into Iraq were going into Iraq long before Guantanamo was, was a serious factor. The people fighting today in Pakistan are fighting Pakistanis. The people--the Taliban who's fighting in Afghanistan, they're not running around using Guantanamo. They're running around using the existence of America. One of the terrorists in Guantanamo recently threw his television down and broke it because he had a picture of a woman with bare arms. I think we are kidding ourselves about who these terrorists are and we're kidding ourselves about the power of this. Guantanamo matters because in America and Europe the left has decided the matter.
...

You could spend a couple of hours closely fact-checking and parsing every way in which this single, oozy slab of trademark Gingrich treachery can be subdivided into individual blocks of mendacity.

From the dismissal of a genuine subject matter expert who directly contradicts Ginrich’s obscene assertions as somehow statistically irrelevant because a bunch of other troops have been to Iraq...

...to the idea that throwing a teevee down makes a person a hardened killer...

(Which, of course, means Elvis Presley was a terrorist:

All the way to 1974, when Elvis finally got some mental satisfaction by nailing Goulet on TV. It occurred while Elvis was working at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. He was in his top-floor suite when he saw Goulet on TV. Elvis took out his gun, shot the TV, and (according to Allexperts.com) said, “Get that s**t outta my house!”

(SCTV and Chicago’s own “Image Union”

were terrorist training organizations.

(And Frank Zappa was some kind of Talibanish

hatespeechifying inciter of anti-teevee violence.)

...you could spin endless yards of comedy gold from all of the idiotic implications of Gingrich’s idiotic words without ever touching on the key point that whatever “facts” Gingrich didn’t just pull straight out of his ass, he got 180 degrees backwards wrong.

From Washington Monthly:

I had heard that as well, after writing my last post on the subject, and was waiting for confirmation before publishing it. Note not just that neither an objection to bare arms nor any other sort of Islamic fundamentalist anything had anything to do with it, but also that the detainee in question is presently living peaceably in Albania.

That means that even if you don't think, as I do, that it is perfectly understandable that someone who had been imprisoned unjustly for seven and a half years might throw a TV to the ground in frustration, and even if you overlook the many US citizens who have tossed the odd appliance around during (say) a bar fight without thereby showing themselves to be terrorists, there is no need to worry about any TV-throwing Uighurs being released into the US. The only Uighurs still in Guantanamo have never thrown any TVs at all.

Of course Gingrich isn't talking to you or me. He is dog-whistling to the Republican Base; telling them that something as trivial as bashing the idiot box is actually an Ominous Harbinger of the Apocalypse, when brown people and furriners with weird names do it.

Tirelessly preaching is the same tired sermon of xenophobia and racism he has been bleating out for 20 years.

Because Gingrich never intends his “arguments” to be taken seriously. It is not merely that Newt Gingrich is a degenerate liar; rather, as he showed with implacable ferocity back in his wingnut backbench bomb-thrower days, Newt doesn’t give a shit about the truth or falsity of anything at all.

To Gingrich, words are nothing more than the linguistic equivalents of virtual particles:

Virtual particles are subatomic particles that form out of "nothing" (vacuum fields conceptually analogous to lines of force between magnetic poles) for extremely short periods of time and then disappear again. …Virtual particles are real and have measurable effects, but the same uncertainty principle that allows them to come into existence dictates that they cannot be directly observed.

From ordering Republicans to call Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity as a means to create tactical political advantage (and then weeping over how terribly partisan politics has become), to pontificating as a Family Values leader while cheating on his second wife with his third mistress, to ordering a brand new wife and his brand new religion calibrated for optimal electoral value straight out of the GOP “Bride, Faith and Beyond” 2012 campaign catalog…words are nothing to Newt but abstract phonemes to be strung together to make the Pig People dance or shout or vote.

Which, over in the Better Universe, would lead me to be much more optimistically inclined in the direction the incomparable Digby points out here:

One of Newt's biggest problems as a politician is all the stupid things he's said in his career. He makes Biden look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison. That's why I hope he runs for president.

However we don’t live in the Better Universe. Over here, in the reality we have, Newt is a card-carrying MSM Village insider with a blank check to inexhaustibly churn his hateful, fact-free bullshit out the Mouse Circus C-130 like a thousand cubic yards of radar-reflecting chaff. One week he is peddling his venom as a George Stephanopoulos “panelist” on one network, and the next week his has slithered across the hall to appear a “guest” of NBC’s resident “Meet the Press” Jughead

whose silk-gloved handjobbing of pustules like Gingrich makes the eyebrow-arching “Hmmm”-a-thons of the late Tim Russert look positively impaling.

Which winds me back to what Chris Matthews had to say during Matthews’ wide-ranging deep-muscle ego massage at the big, tender hands of Chuckles Rose on his eponymous show Monday (h/t Blue Gal)

Matthews: Some of the bloggers jumped on me an this is what I think explains what some people think of me. When we first went into Iraq...

Rose: What do you think they think about you?

Matthews: The don’t quite get me. First of all, I’m a grown up and they resent that. And secondly, also, I have a job – they don’t like that either. Hehehe. That’s really gonna fester them in anger.

And later…

Matthews: I’m not a Lefty because I’d rather be wrong about something that’s fundamental and have it good for my country. I wanted to be wrong [about Iraq]. That’s why I’m different than these bloggers and these people that are so cocksure about themselves. I’d rather have my country succeed than be right.

Looking back over the last four-plus years, I find that I have now done between 150 and 170 (depending on how you keep score) of these Sunday Morning after-action, bomb damage assessments. And from the very start, SCMD was never going to be a transcriptional analysis because the Mouse Circus is kabuki theater, and merely transcribing that which has already come right out of the can thoroughly pre-scripted seemed a waste of time and pixels.

No, the Mouse Circus deserves to be treated as what it is: is a weekly Member’s Only puppet show where trail balloons are launched, Approved Talking Point rations are doled out, and impotent millionaires feign passion for one side of fake controversy or another and rub their wizened political genitalia all over each other in stilted orgies of mock public discourse.

From Taibbi:

The entire news business is dominated by financial considerations. In fact it’s probably more accurate to say that the business is dominated by financial desperation. TV networks routinely run blatant advertorials about new “miracle cures” or product launches (new movie releases are a classic example). Moreover they routinely ignore important news stories if they don’t offer an angle that sells. The whole industry, I mean the entire news industry, missed the financial crisis, and do you know why? I know why. Because there wasn’t a single news organization in the country that could afford to put boring mortgages on the front page.

The game was well and truly lost when Fox proved it could carve out the first new network in 40 years and steal market share from the Big Three by vertically integrating soft core porn, raunchy cartoons and Archie Bunker News. It was lost when the Big Three –- panicked by the hemorrhaging loss of Low Information/High Bigotry viewers and their billions of dollars in buying power -– began openly pandering to the opinions of demagogues and degenerates under the fig leaf of “objective” journalism.

You know Chris, of all the tawdry, narcissistic little lies you and your craven brethren tell each other about why you botched your professional responsibilities so catastrophically during the Age of Bush, the most disgraceful is that you somehow failed because of an excessive love of country. That your massive, throbbing patriotism compensates for your massive, throbbing fuck-ups and your superiority to the childlike, jobless Lefties of your shallow imagination somehow exists in direct proportion to the immense scale of your dereliction “because [you’d] rather be wrong about something that’s fundamental and have it good for [you’re] country.”

Chris, I don’t know a single angry Lefty blogger who wouldn’t dearly love to have been wrong about the last eight years, precisely because we saw what a disaster was waiting for us at the bottom of the abyss into which the Cheny Torture Administration was plunging rhe nation. We saw the car being driven off a cliff by a drunk and tried every way we knew how to warn everyone who would listen.

Mostly we got called traitors and were told to shut up.

You, on the other hand, sold your professional soul to a smirking chimp because he looked like a flight suit.

From Media Matters:

Chief among the cheerleaders was MSNBC's Chris Matthews. On the May 1, 2003, edition of Hardball, Matthews was joined in his effusive praise of Bush by right-wing pundit Ann Coulter and "Democrat" Pat Caddell. Former U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-CA) also appeared on the program.:

MATTHEWS: What's the importance of the president's amazing display of leadership tonight?

[...]

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically [...], the president deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That [...] if you're going to run against him, you'd better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[...]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here's a president who's really nonverbal. He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Ann Coulter, you're the first to speak tonight on the buzz. The president's performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan -- what do you think?

COULTER: It's stunning. It's amazing. I think it's huge. I mean, he's landing on a boat at 150 miles per hour. It's tremendous. It's hard to imagine any Democrat being able to do that. And it doesn't matter if Democrats try to ridicule it. It's stunning, and it speaks for itself.

MATTHEWS: Pat Caddell, the president's performance tonight on television, his arrival on ship?

CADDELL: Well, first of all, Chris, the -- I think that -- you know, I was -- when I first heard about it, I was kind of annoyed. It sounded like the kind of PR stunt that Bill Clinton would pull. But and then I saw it. And you know, there's a real -- there's a real affection between him and the troops.

[...]

MATTHEWS: The president there -- look at this guy! We're watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he's flown --

CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.

MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him -- I mean, he seems like -- he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

CADDELL: Yes. It's a -- I don't know. You know, it's an internal thing. I don't know if you can put it into words. [...] You can see it with him and the troops, the ease with which he talks to them. I was amazed by that, frankly, because as I said, I was originally appalled, particularly when I heard he was going in an F-18. But -- on there -- but the -- but you know, that was --

MATTHEWS: Look at this guy!

CADDELL: -- was hard not to be moved by their reaction to him and his reaction to them and --

MATTHEWS: You know, Ann --

CADDELL: -- you know, they -- it's a quality. It's an innate quality. It's a real quality.

MATTHEWS: I know. I think you're right.

Later that day, on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Matthews said:

MATTHEWS: We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president.

No, Chris, you failed because you were a chump. You and your colleagues failed because you refused to commit the considerable resources at your disposal to do the very job for which you are so massively overcompensated: the job of digging and digging and digging. Of asking really hard questions of powerful people when it is unpopular to do so.

What I don’t have -- what no bloggers have, Chris -- is NBC or ABC paying me a small fortune every week to put on a fucking puppet show. I don’t have staff. Research assistants. Interns. Any of that. What I have are several jobs which, when splinted together, keep me from falling into the maw of unemployment and poverty slightly more slowly than would otherwise be the case.

What I do have is a constant and rising sense of rage and tragedy at how deeply and brutally our media has failed us. How, time and again, the men and women in the shiny hair, $1,000 suits and seven-figure salaries have abandoned us. Have taken their 30 pieces of silver to sell our democracy into the hands of its loudest and most malignant internal enemies.

What I don’t have is access to Newt Gingrich...or David Gregory…or Chris Matthews. Or anyone who knows them. Or anyone who knows anyone who knows them. So what I cannot do is get a straight answer to the very simple question: Why in the fuck are depraved ambulatory snafus and serial liars like Newt Gingrich given a major media platform week after week after week? And why doesn’t anyone anywhere have the balls to actually ask the sonofabitch anything remotely resembling a real question?

The bloggers I know, Chris, are all grownups. They are moms and mechanics. Teachers and tradesmen. Students and singers. Writers and waiters. Comedians. Techies. Cube rats and counselors. Lawyers and secretaries. Anything and everything you can think of.

The bloggers I know are the kind of good, hard-working Americans who live every day one cracked axle or broken arm away from penury, and what they have in abundance is stress, shrinking wages and mounting bills.

What they do not have are lavishly-funded front organizations like Gingrich’s “American Solutions for Winning the Future” into which wealthy patrons can dump tens of millions of dollars to underwrite their political agendas such as (Source: the essential IRS Political Organization Filing and Disclosure site. All amounts represent aggregate year-to-date contributions for the third and fourth quarters of 2008)...

A tiny sampling from year-to-date September 2008 reporting:

International Speedway Corp (In a flurry of $4,600 and $8,200 third quarter contributions) -- $ 57,200

Bernie Marcus -- The Marcus Foundation
$ 250,000

Mr. Frank Hanna -- World Wide Assets, Inc.
$ 80,000

Sheldon Adelson -- Las Vegas Sands Corp.
$ 2,933,660
...

A tiny sampling from year-to-date December 2008 reporting:

Charles Schwab -- Charles Schwab & Company
$ 50,000

Mr. John M. Templeton Jr. -- John Templeton Foundation
$ 11,200

Seeme Hasan
$ 10,000

...

The bloggers I know have nothing remotely like that financial artillery at their command.

They also do not have the most important thing that money can buy: Time.

And yet what they do, Chris, virtually every fucking day of their lives is the one thing that your peers in the Villager somehow cannot bestir themselves to bother with; steal a few minutes out of each day -- maybe in the morning before the kids are up and absorbing every erg they’ve got, or at the end of another long day laboring in the deepening shadow of bankruptcy -- to perform that most basic and sacred rite of citizenship.

Staying informed.

“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

-- Thomas Jefferson

They take what little time and energy they have left from their depleted reserves and try to make sense of the world around them.

Try to rapidly read and listen and to mine a little bit of truth from a media that traffics in deception and distraction. Usually exhausted and often deeply frightened by a world we see falling to rags and rubble around us, we learned the hard lesson of the last 16 years of progressively more pathetic and shamelessly corporate media.

That we are on our own.

That if we want to glean some facts and context from the feculent tsunami of spin and bullshit and “America Idol” and runaway cancer kids that is the Big Dollar media, the self-important, process-addicted, status-quo defending, penis-obsessed-but-torture-ignoring, wildly overpaid children of the Village are the very last people on Earth we can trust.

So instead of giving up we push back. We set out alone or in little groups -- usually with few resources beyond the money in our pockets and the shirts on our backs -- across a vast and hostile cultural landscape where we are constantly harassed and belittled by an entire menagerie of malefactors of great wealth whose power depends entirely on creating and maintaining toxic levels of public ignorance and fear.

We make this lonely, exhausted pilgrimage because we are desperate to figure out what to make of the world in which we live, and to share what we learn as best we can with our friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.

Because -- as we learned from our mothers and fathers and elementary school teachers long ago -- that is what good Americans do.

It is just about as pure and Capraeqsue an act of citizenship as I can think of, Chris.

Which is probably why it seems so angry and alien to you.