Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The Devil Comes for his Due

Edition.

It was a Villager Mardi Gras parade through one of Hell’s lesser circles this Sunday: not a single hoary establishmentarian cliché went unfurled; not a single Beltway Ba’al went unworshiped; and, sadly, the nascent
Prove It, Motherfucker movement went unmemed yet again.

Starting on “This Week” there was poor Katrina vanden Huevel, gamely slugging it out but out-Villagered 3.7-to-1.

A typical, if imaginary, exchange:

Republican Matthew Dowd: The economy has failed. People are still unemployed. We’ve spent 800 billion dollars. We all gonna dieeeeee!

George Stephanopoulos: But every expert agrees that without the stimulus things would have been much worse.

Dowd: Yeah, but if you're unemployed, you don't give a shit that your neighbor isn't. Wake up, man! The world is a Hobbsean wasteland, where people'll knife you over a rat cutlet and a half a roll of toilet paper, and your so-called "neighbors" are just stupid loser meatbags who’ll try to sneak into your bomb shelter, steal your pemmican and fuck your daughter when Helter Skelter finally comes down!

Wow. And just when you thought the Party of God's grasp of basic Christian principles couldn't get any more tenuous...

George Will whined about too many taxes.

Check.

Too much regulation.

Check.

Hoover forever! Gummint never!

Check.

We’re going to have gummint subsidizing washing machines, I tells ya! Also ice boxes, stereopticons and those newfangled self-cranking Victrolas that all the kids are playing that devil jazz music on.

Check and…check.

Meanwhile Cokie Roberts crowed and gurgled and rocked back and forth on her “B’rak Oh-bama shouldn’t have gone winging off to Copenhagen” Villager wisdom like it was her own, private pair of atomic powered ben wa balls.

Check.

Same deal over on the Meet the Press, where Fluffy the Marionette

interlocuted his merry band with insightful questiony/commenty/smirky-asidey word farts like this (direct quote):

“But let's--if there's a bumper sticker to be found you can probably find it on Twitter, because that's where there are a lot of--140 characters or less…”

Well, how about?

It is only once
The Boulevard of Wisdom
Has been whored down to 140 Characters
That a shallow trifle like Greggers
Could pass for a newsman

Gregory then made a graveside toast to Dear, Departed Civility and wondered who on Earth could have killed it...

...while everyone politely ignored the blood on each other’s hands.

Well, everyone but Rachel Maddow, who politely noted that angry talk only makes the news when Democrats do it (citing half a dozen examples of Republican lawmakers accusing Democrats of scheming to off various groups of people) because hysterical ranting from elected Republicans has become so accepted as normal that no one even notices anymore.

Like Katrina vanden Huevel two channels over, Rachel was also outnumbered by people (in this case, David Brooks, Mike Murphy and David Gregory) whose careers depend entirely on maintaining a Iron Curtain of denial about the true nature and history the Republican Party.

Rachel Maddow: Yeah, but there really needs to be a reckoning on the Right. Sarah Palin – fucking wackaloon she may be – was the Vice Presidential candidate of your Party. She will sell a gazillion books. She did choose a white supremacist to “co-write” her book. She is the strongest brand on the GOP.

David Fucking Brooks

snoozes his way through this payday by essentially re-reading the pop-up, children's version of the polished little turds he strung together to fill up his NYT column from Friday and from which the plot for this little bit of Villager kabuki was obviously drawn.

Brooks’ Big Lie – the same Big Lie that has been desperately promulgated by the teevee-friendly Right for years – is that the Boss Limbaugh and all of his little bigot and lunatic clones and minions somehow haven’t really infested the Conservative Movement from crotch to crown.

Somehow really don’t run the GOP.


Bobo on Sunday:

Yeah, I think this is a media circus, and this is not where the country is. If you're trying to build an audience for your talk radio show of a few million people this works, this solidifies the audience. It's not where the country is.

Except it’s not “a few millions” and Bobo damn well knows it.

From the Washington Post:

“…
According to what Limbaugh delights in calling "the drive-by media," the number varies wildly. Is it 30 million (Pat Buchanan on MSNBC), 20 million (Time magazine, ABC News), 19 million (Fox News), 14 million (CNN), or "14.2 million to about 25 million" (The Washington Post)?

Answer: Maybe.

Limbaugh is widely acknowledged to be the most popular talk-radio host, as evidenced by the record $400 million, eight-year contract he signed with his syndicator last July.
…

His three-hour daily program is carried on more than 600 domestic stations, but these stations don't all carry the show at the same time or even for the same duration. Most air all three hours of Limbaugh's broadcast each weekday, but some carry only two hours. Arbitron has never attempted to aggregate all of this audience data for this many stations and times. "There is no economic motivation for any objective third party to do that kind of analysis," says Thom Mocarsky, an Arbitron spokesman.

…
No matter the exact figure, Harrison says Limbaugh's weekly audience eclipses all other nationally syndicated personalities, including conservatives Sean Hannity (13.25 million), Michael Savage (8.25 million) and Laura Ingraham (5.5 million), according to the magazine's "rough projections."

Now add to that the several million loyal Christopathic followers of demagogues like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Tony Perkins and you have the Pig People: those Ignorant Armies out on the darkling plains of politics which Conservative scribblers like Bobo were only too happy to have on their side when they were screaming for Bill Clinton’s blood or smashing the way to victory for Reagan, Gingrich, DeLay and Cheney...

...but now that the Devil they helped conjure has come for his due,


those same cowardly REMF’s of the Conservative Movement want to wish-wish-wish him away.

And so they frantically crank out page after laughable page of Wingnut Alternate History fiction wherein the Pig People and their Bigot Overlords somehow never really existed as anything other than Political Elevator Music, and in which Liberals were always somehow just as violent, vociferous, malignantly uninformed and vitriolic as the Wingtard Right has been for 30 years.

More Brooks on Sunday:

We have more independents in this country than Democrats or Republicans. Even on the Republican side we've got, you know, frankly, people I consider loons and harmful for America: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, all these guys. They don't control the Republican Party.

See? It’s all an illusion. And much more importantly for Brooks’ frantic efforts to sandbag his precarious self-image against the rising tide of ugly reality, we are all required to believe that this illusion is of very recent vintage.

Brooks from Friday:

Let us take a trip back into history. Not ancient history. Recent history. It is the winter of 2007. The presidential primaries are approaching. The talk jocks like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and the rest are over the moon about Fred Thompson. They’re weak at the knees at the thought of Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, they are hurling torrents of abuse at the unreliable deviationists: John McCain and Mike Huckabee. …

No, Bobo; let’s you and me take an inconveniently longer view of history, shall we? Because there is a huge, stinking albatross hanging around the necks of Quislings like you, and all the quibbling, spinning and denial in the world is not going to make people like me help you pretend it isn't there.

For example, let’s looks at this snip from Tucker Carlson's Mommy's Time Magazine puff-piece on Rush Limbaugh from January of 1995:

The new Speaker and Rush have spoken, he guesses, only "seven, eight times at the most." Rush has kept less distance from the new members, who have been called the "Dittohead Caucus" and dubbed him the "Majority Maker."

That's 15 years ago, Bobo. 15 years ago, and the newly-minted Republican Congressional Majority was giving Boss Limbaugh tongue baths and thanking him for giving them their political manhood.

Odd, isn't it, how David Fucking Brooks always fails to remember that?

Hell, as long as three years ago even dirty little bloggers like me were noticing -- loudly -- that professional liars like Bobo were spending enormous amounts of time and energy desperately trying to blot out the despicable history of their depraved movement:

...
Perhaps if he occasionally got up off his knees and bothered to look at who was paying the freight at the Party he was hired to strip, lap-dance and bareback?

Perhaps if used a 100-watt-bulb instead of a 20-watter in that dimly-lit booth he uses when he knobs his overlords he would have noticed at some point in the last thirty fucking years the True Face of the men who run his Party.
...

But even after torturing the marrow right out of the English language, Bobo still cannot stress-position his two ridiculous and diametrically opposed lies into neat hospital corners.

Although the sheer prevaricative chutzpah he displays as he first pretends that the ascendancy of the Pre-Frontal Limbaughtomy Right is some kind of fantasy cooked up by "cynical Democrats" and "lazy pundits" and then…

…One Paragraph Later…

chastises Republican politicians because they:

“…mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist.

They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people.”

is genuinely breathtaking.

And if Bobo needed one more daisy-cutter in his wheelhouse, Paul Krugman deftly sinks his NYT colleague's entire cargo of bullshit thusly:

...

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

But of course, for all the jeering and Bobo-pinata-whacking, at Sunday's end only three sad truths endure:

1. Anyone with a political memory longer than 140 characters knows David Fucking Brooks is lying about the longstanding dominance of Limbaugh and his ilk over the Conservative Movement and the Republican Party.
We know it.
They know it.
The Mouse Circus producers know it. The sound crew. The grips. The hair-and-makeup people. The secretaries. The administrative assistants. The housekeeping staff. The garbage collectors. The drivers. The copier guys. The laconic eyerollers from IT. The cafeteria staff. Security.

Everybody. Knows. It.


2. Anyone with access to YouTube and a functional mouse can prove it.



3. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can tell that it doesn’t matter how often or baldly Conservatives lie. No one will ever call them on it. No one will ever fire them for it. And they will continue to nest in the highest and most privileged places of the Mainstream Media and piss on our heads until their toxic tree fort is razed and replaced with some form of American jourmalism that doesn't visibly ooze contempt for truth, reason, integrity and democracy.