Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The “Both Sides Do It” bucket brigade was out in force Sunday, furiously flicking teaspoons of stagnate Centrism onto blazes set and fanned by the Republican Party.

The GOP’s favorite anal Water Pic -- David Gregory -- led the charge on “Meet the Press” in his response to this by Tom Brokaw, which I probably did not quote 100% accurately, heaving into a bucket as I was at the time from all the Bipartisan fumes.

Brokaw: I come fwom a time in Amewica when any school-child or pawent would have been thrilled to have Prewident Harding come to their pesthole of a town and tell them to “Just Say NO to w-w—w--Rickets!” In fact, I wemember when President Wockefellah came to my skoo and gave everweone a shiny new dime. Which we gave to the USO to defeat Hitwah!


Gregory: I have noticed a lack of respect for the Office of the President. Going back to the time when I was Karl Rove’s auxiliary jiz dumpster, I remember on several occasions as I was orally servicing his magnificent penis when his dainty hand momentarily lost their mule drivers’ grip on my ears and I overheard someone, somewhere – perhaps passing the alley where I was performing my journalism, or perhaps just in my head -- say “Well, George Bush isn’t my President”. And I would look up into Karl’s big, crusty eyes, beat his doughy knees and weep, “Yes he is! Yes he is!” So, Awesome 9/11 America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani, isn’t the losing-their-shit hysteria on the Right over President Obama telling their kids to stay in school exactly like that imaginary scenario I just invented?

Awesome 9/11 America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani: Yes, David Gregory, it is exactly the same thing. Starting a very long time ago, people for some reason stopped trusting politicians.


driftglass: It’s creepy how David Gregory has absolutely no political or cultural memory that pre-dates the Cheney Administration. No mention of the Clinton impeachment, seven years of Whitewater and Vince Foster or the Arkansas Project. No mention of the ascension of Limbaugh and Falwell from fringe goons to Party Leaders. No mention of Newt Gingrich carrying on Lee Atwater’s filthy, sapper work of destroying public discourse and demonizing opponents for political gain. No mention of militia crazies. No mention of black helicopter and One World paranoia running like wildfire through the Right, enthusiastically egged on by Party leaders and Hate Radio.

No, in Gregory’s willfully ignorant fantasy teevee version of history, the Universe before 2001 was dark and without form and void, until Liberals spontaneously began hating George W. Bush for no good reason.


Tom Friedman: People need to say that this is flat out stupid. We dance around it, but this is flat out stupid.

Gregory: Isn’t it all just a byproduct of this koo-koo, mixed-up “media age” that we all live in, which somehow makes people like me obscenely rich but for which people like me are never held responsible?


Friedman: In this koo-koo, mixed-up “media age”, everyone with a phone is a “photographer”, and everyone with a blog is a “reporter”.

driftglass: Just like every fop with a smirk, good hair and Karl Rove’s urine stains on his tie is a “Host of Meet the Press”.

Brokaw: People say all kinds of crazy shit, and then justify it because they ‘read it on the internet’.

Now, wait for it…

Wait…

for…

it...

Brokaw: It’s not one side of the political spectrum or the other. It’s both sides believing all kindsa crazy shit!

Yay!

Of course, since the single most destructive lie the media force-feeds Americans every day is the lie that “Both Sides Are Equally Wrong All The Time” maybe next time you open your pie-hole, Tom, you could be bothered to check your “facts” before spewing them all over teevee and the internets.

Perhaps you could start with the famous PIPA poll of Bush and Kerry voters just before the 2004 election, which documented that the Limbaugh-chugging meatsticks on the Right were overwhelmingly more likely to adamantly believe a whole lot of crazy shit than were the Lefties.

From a tiny, sad snip from AlterNET reporting on the results of a 2004, pre-election poll (with emphasis added):

…
In particular, majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assume that he supports multilateral approaches to various international issues, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (69 percent), the land mine treaty (72 percent), and the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming (51 percent).

In August, two-thirds of Bush supporters also believed that Bush supported the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although that figure dropped to a 53 percent majority in the PIPA poll, it's not much of a drop considering that Bush explicitly denounced the ICC in the first, most widely watched presidential debate in late September.

In all of these cases, majorities of Bush supporters said they favored the positions that they imputed, incorrectly, to Bush. Large majorities of Kerry supporters, on the other hand, showed they knew both their candidate's and Bush's positions on the same issues.
…

Friedman: The internet is an open sewer of untreated information, Left, Right Center, Up and Down. Every modem should come with a Surgeon General’s warning.


So should every copy of “David and Flat-sheba” or whatever Friedman’s next breathless collection of maudlin homilies will be entitled.


On “Fox News Sunday” there was a lot of talk about “ramming”.

Republican Senator Lamar Alexander was very concerned that “ramming through a partisan bill using reconciliation” would be thumbing your nose at the American people. “Like going to war without Congressional approval.”

Democrat Howard Dean pointed out that reconciliation has been used 23 times. Including Dubya “ramming” through his disastrous tax cuts.

After which there was a bit of a silence, because there are a hundred arguments that anyone with a basic command of the facts can use to show a Republican the error of their ways; a hundred verbal ball peen hammers that can easily lay waste their lies and hypocrisies.

Anyone can shut them down momentarily, but no one can change their minds, so anyone still paddling their bipartisan canoes around in the noxious cultural backwash that is the GOP is wasting our precious time.

Howard Dean, is one of the few Democrats of national stature who can say out loud what everyone knows and says in private: that this is going to be a partisan fight, because Republicans are not interesting in anything except burning the Obama Presidency to the ground.

Newt Gingrich, who now Speaks Every Sentence Declaratively on behalf of The American People says that gummint will always fail at everything and can never be trusted to do anything ever. And that “ramming a partisan bill through would be a tragedy.”

You know, I remember it as if it were only weeks ago…Newt Gingrich being called out, yet again, for lying to the American people on national teevee, yet again:

From Washington Monthly:

…
Stephanopoulos had just finished highlighting Sarah Palin's bizarre attack on reform, including her allegation that President Obama wants to create a "death panel" as part of a "downright evil" system. The disgraced former House Speaker jumped in.

GINGRICH: But why -- why didn't you put up what Dr. Zeke Emanuel said? Because Dr. Zeke Emanuel, who's the chief adviser to the president and brother of the chief of staff, said in writing...

STEPHANOPOULOS: He's not the chief health care adviser. He's written three articles between 1996 and 2008 that include some of those phrases...

GINGRICH: Communal standards.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Those phrases appear nowhere in the bill. The only thing...let me just explain what's in the bill and then get you to respond to that. The only thing in the bill is they would allow Medicare to pay for what they say is voluntary counseling on end-of-life issues.

GINGRICH: I think people are very concerned, when you start talking about cost controls, that a bureaucracy -- we don't -- you're asking us to trust the government.... Communal standards historically is a very dangerous concept.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not in the bill.

There are a few interesting angles to this. Notice that Gingrich just casually insisted that Ezekiel Emanuel is "the chief adviser to the president." He was lying, and Stephanopoulos called him on it. Instead of acknowledging the error, Gingrich kept going, blasting a policy that isn't in the bill, and rationalizing his baseless attack by arguing that the public is "very concerned."

Well, perhaps Americans are "very concerned" because people like Gingrich keep making arguments that aren't true.
…

There is no sin Conservatives like Gingrich can commit that is so beyond the pale that will get their All Access teevee pundit credentials revoked.

Speaking of which…

On “This Week” Republicans call for a nonexistent bipartisanship that they spent every waking hour trying to undermine.

George Will (on being attacked for suggesting that we can’t “win” in Afghanistan): Look, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps agrees with me. Officers in and out of the Corps agree with me. We’ll have this debate and I’ll have plenty brass on my side.

Because it's all about you, George.

Katrina vanden Heuvel (Nation Magazine): I finally agree with George Will about something.

driftglass: Why does Conservative George Will hate America?

Matthew Dowd: We can send someone through medical school in eight years, but we can’t train the Afghan police in that time?

driftglass: Why does Conservative Matthew Dowd hate America?

Stephanopoulos: And let’s not forget all the fraud in the Afghan elections.

driftglass: Why does George Stephanopoulos hate America?

David Sanger (New York Times): Also the corruption of our puppet gummint there.

driftglass: Why does David Sanger hate America?

Matthew Dowd: The American public is done with Afghanistan. They’re tired of it.

driftglass: Cut-and-run bastards! Why does America hate America?

Matthew Dowd: Health care? We need bipartisanship, which, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, is like a lady, in that it has many icky parts in its pants that frighten me.

George Will: There is an inverse relationship between the quantity of Barack Obama’s health care speeches

Katrina V: But that’s just bullsh...

Stephanopoulos: Shut up; we have to move on to ranting wingnut fears that Barack Obama is going to use his message to school kids to encourage Socialist butt sex.

Matthew Dowd: This is amazing to me. I am very surprised. How did this happen?

George Will: The problem is, Barack Obama “is in our face too much” as the hep kids say down in "the 'hood". It is not the federal gummint’s job to educate our kids. Everyone knows that rich kids go to Exeter and poor kids go to the workhouses. Which is exactly what Jebus intended when he wrote the Constitution and invented baseball!

Matthew Dowd: To be honest, it reminds me exactly of the Left did to George W. Bush. No matter what


he did,


no matter


how awesome he was,


they were going to


bash him.



driftglass: Yes, I remember it like it was yesterday, those terrible lies that the Left was spreading on Teh Internets, forcing Serious Media Personages to spend most of the Bush Administration pooping their Objective Journalism pull-ups.

Lies like…

…We were lied into Iraq.
…There were no WMDs.
…There was no nuclear program.
…Don Rumsfeld was a catastrophe, and Bush Iraq policy was a botched Neocon/ideologically-driven disaster.
…Bill Kristol is a hack and a liar.
…Iraq was never going to pay for itself.
…The 2000 election positively reeked of fraud.
…The Bush White House outed an active CIA agent.
…People were murdered in our custody and in our name.
…There is an Iraqi insurgency and we caused it.
…We had allowed torture and indefinite, secret detention to become national policy.
…Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.
…Millions of American citizens were being illegally wiretapped.
…Karl Rove was responsible for firing several US attorneys for not helping him rig elections.

And literally hundreds more!

Each one of which was, according to the collective wisdom of many of those same Serious Media Personages, exactly identical in terms of their factual basis and relationship to real-world events as the “issues” which now angry up the Right. Issues like:

…Barack Obama is dirty Commie.
…Barack Obama “pals round with terrorists.”
…Barack Obama wants to kill your grandmother, right after
…Barack Obama kills Sarah Palin’s baby! Which is all the more terrifying because,
...Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, and therefore is not the “real” President.

Meanwhile, George Will gives Teen America some long overdue straight talk about the latest attempts by the federal gummint to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids

this time through the insidious vehicle of a gummint PSA on how to cough into your sleeve to avoid spreading swine flu.

A PSA that will be seen by children, Mandrake! Poor, innocent children!


Katrina V: But that’s just bullsh..

Stephanopoulos: Shut up.