Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Or “How is the Obama Administration trying to kill old people and veterans this week?”

On “Fox News Sunday” Jim Towey, (president of Saint Vincent College and former director of the Bush White House Office for Throwing Tax Money at Fundies) explains how the Liberal Veteran’s Administration it planning to drive people to kill themselves.

Chris Wallace: Really?

Towey: Yes. Because the Gummint has a financial stake in killing old people and the disabled.

Wallace: Golly.

Towey: Golly indeed, Chris. Golly indeed.

Wallace: Who is this “Dr. Pearlman” bastard who wrote this document (holds up document) that tells veterans to kill themselves?

Towey: He used red-blooded American Taxpayer Money to research his Pamphlet of Doom. He influences the Obama Administration’s “Kill the Veterans” policy and yet nobody knows who he is.

driftglass: Pssst. Nobody knows who you are either. Of course, when they find out, you may have to leave town.

Wallace: To be fair, some people might say that Barack Obama doesn’t want to kill veterans.

Towey: It could be that he doesn’t know about this pamphlet, and has left the actual mechanics of snuffing the last of The Greatest Generation to the Sinister Liberal Underbosses who work for him.

Wallace: I just pissed myself in terror. Is the VA going to try to kill me?

Towey: Are you a veteran?

Wallace collapses in laughter.

Towey: Oh yeah. I forgot. This is Fox.


Skipping lightly over to “Meet the Press” , we find David Gregory dressed up in Jack Nicholson’s Joker castoffs and playing journalist.

Gregory: The President has backed off of his support for a public health care option, hasn’t he?

Chuck Schumer: No, he hasn’t.

Gregory: Sure he has.

Schumer: Not one little bit.

Gregory: Yes he has.

Schumer: No, he hasn’t.

Long, dramatic pause that s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s out and out and o-u-t….

Gregory: Yes he has!

Schumer: No, he hasn’t.

Gregory: Yes he has.

Schumer: No, he hasn’t.

Gregory: Yes he has.

Schumer: No, he hasn’t.

Gregory: The CBO said ten million people would go into a public insurance plan.

Hatch: I said tens of millions.

Gregory: Ten million people is different than tens of millions of people.

Hatch: No it’s not.

Gregory: Yes it is

Hatch: No it’s not.

Gregory: Yes it is

Hatch: No it’s not.

Another brilliant, lengthy pause during which I re-grouted the lakefront between Foster Avenue and the Oak Street Beach.

When I got back…

Gregory: Yes it is!

Hatch: No it’s not.

Gregory: Curse your wily ways, Hatch!


Gregory then just tosses the keys to "his" show to Republican henchman Joe Scarborough, who left skidmarks up one side Tavis Smiley and down the other.

Typical exchange --

Joe Scarborough: Obama never for one fucking minute tried to be “bipartisan” about health care.

Gregory: Yeah! Suck it!

Tavis Smiley: I agree witch you, but…

Thanks, Tavis. Thanks a bunch.

Scarborough just rambled on and on, largely uninterrupted, PEZ-ing out little gems like:

The problem is the hate speech on both sides.

Got that? Because in case you missed it, Joe Scar obligingly sledgehammered that lie home over and over again

The hate speech on both sides…

… on both sides.

… on both sides.

… on both sides.

While Gregory nodded eagerly, and Smiley scrambled to be affable and agreeable and tuck a word in here and there between pauses in Scarborough’s rambling. Smiley has done good work on other occasions, but here he sounded like he was trying out for the Juan Williams role in the Fox News Sunday touring company.

Very disappointing.

Gregory: Next up; just how supergreat was Bob Novak?


On ”The Chris Matthews Show” Joe "Jokeline" Klein mourns the decline in international journalism and the consequent loss of “Haircuts in Kabul” stories, while Chris Matthews’ crew demonstrates they still can’t quite get their shit together




in the Chicago market


enough to state simply and clearly

when and where

their little clubhouse magic camera obscura show is broadcast, forcing at least one blogger to watch Tweety’s “Whither newspapers?”-themed teevee show on the internets.

Tweety started by accidentally explaining why he is light-years past his cultural sell-by date when he said:

We loveses the media in Murrica! On teevee, we like watching stuff like this.


And down at the nickelodeons, the kids can't get enough of talkies like “The Front Page” (from 78 years ago) and “All The President’s Men” (from 33 years ago)

Bob Woodward explained that he is optimistic that journalism will survive the mass extinction of newspapers.

Woodward: The future is with what Tina Brown does.

driftglass: The future is Barry Diller's Amex Centurion Card?

Woodward: And teevee. And magazines. And suchlike. Why I hear “Boy’s Life” is offering two cents a word! And if the “news” isn’t “available” for free, the “young people” will develop “business models” (like Tina) and it will work and people will make money.

Tina Brown: What we don’t yet have are the “budgets” to do all that investigative “reporting”. So the “business model” isn’t quite there yet. Mostly everyone is just scared out of their minds.

driftglass: Well, at least there's a plan.

Matthews: What is Murrica going to be like when we have our coffee and look out onto the driveway, and there’s no paper there!? Won't the survivors envy the dead?

driftglass: What’s a “driveway”?

Matthews: Right now people are mediajacking (tm) from places like the Washington Post and reselling in a secondary market. When’s the WaPo gonna get that money back?

Woodward: Well, the young “whippersnappers” haven’t worked out the “business model” yet. But when they do, boy howdy!

Matthews: Yeah, but whose gonna pay to get Jokeline’s beard Martinized in Kabul?

Jokeline: Right now, Time Magazine pays for that, but even they don’t have the money anymore for the little potpourri bags for my underpants. Later, on the internets, someone else will figure all this out, and I’ll be back to my ass smelling like dried apples and juniper berries.

Matthews: Wha’ about fact checking?

Gloria Borger: We fact check. Our editors fact check.

Matthews: But da bloggers. Da bloggers don’t fact check.

(Later, the irritatingly long-memoried Think Progress (via Digby) retroactively spoiled the pouty party by pointing out certain inconvenient truths:

It’s ironic that a cable news host such as Chris Matthews would attack bloggers for supposedly not checking their facts, considering the amount of falsehoods and factually inaccurate statements he regularly utters on the air — which have all been fact-checked by bloggers.)

Jokeline: Nobody fact checks.

Brown: Have any of you all even heard of The Googles? There is no information that is not available online now. This idea that fact checking has to be separate from reporting is absurd.

Matthews: But dat’s not fact checking! Perry White didn’t use The Googles! People over at Vanity Fair and suchlike check stories out line-by-line.

Brown: Yeah. Using Teh Internets!

Jokeline: You know who fact checks us? Our readers. Why do you know how rich I’d be if I had a dollar for every time some dirty fucking hippie called me out for being a tool? (pauses to do the math). Uh, never mind.

Borger: There is a difference between the quality of the fact checking and the quality of the journalism.

Borger: Blogging is very solitary. And soul-killing. Like bee keeping. Or serial midday peep show autoerotic asphyxiation.

Matthews: Can The Online do it?

Brown: Sure! All they need is the will. And the budget And the editorial rigor…

driftglass: And all I need for a ham and cheese sammich is some ham…and some cheese…and some bread…

Epilogue: Someday someone somewhere will come up with some trick for making money doing journalism, at which point Rosalind Russell will rise from the grave to fetch in Chris Matthews’ slippers and morning paper, and all will once again be right with the world.

On “This Week” – during the long summer of Health Care and economic collapse -- 2008 Presidential loser John “The economy is not my strong suit” McCain makes his 22,987th appearance on the Mouse Circus to star in this week's exciting episode of "The Trifleman" in which Pa McCain

takes lil' George Stephanopoulos camping.
Shows him how to catch a fish.
Start a fire.

After which Stephanopoulos grills him mercilessly on the status of the U.S. military.

Stephanopoulos: Exactly how awesome is our military, pa?

McCain: Very awesome, Georgie-boy. Very awesome.

Stephanopoulos: Do you think your party is trying to fuck over Obama as a sleazy political tactic?

McCain: Gosh, I hope not.

*sigh*

The Panel offered a little redemption, however, as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich beat Frum and Will like toy drums.

George Will: The problem isn’t that American health care is an internationally embarrassing disaster. The problem is Obama is too shrill.

Paul “The Shrill One” Krugman: I feel like it’s 2004 again, where saying something that is undoubtedly true is considered shrill.

driftglass: For Republicans, it is always 2004. Or the day Reagan ascended bodily to Heaven.

Paul Krugman: The thing is that when we talk about bipartisanship is that people usually think about getting the Center. Of getting the “20 Senators in the middle”. The problem is, the “20 Senators in the middle” are all Democrats. The Republicans have become a rump on the Right.

And "boom" went the dynamite.

The difference between Krugman and Reich’s synchronized shredding and Tavis Smiley’s palooka performance on “Meet the Press” on virtually the same issues is that people like Krugman not only master their facts, but they are unafraid to tell the truth.

They call liars “liars”.

They call hypocrites “hypocrites”.

And unsurprisingly, to people like Joe Scarborough and George Will -- whose livelihood depends on keeping the lies spinning – this “undoubtedly true” talk sounds at best “shrill”, and at worst like “hate speech”.