Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Long ago when I began working this ugly end of the waterfront -- “Past the square/past the bridge/past the mills/past the stacks" -- there was very little out here. A couple of fact-based reiterations of who-said-what, and some late-arriving video clips, but mostly it was just a few “sidewalk fishermen”, carving out a niche by retrieving the loose change dropped though the Big Media Commentariat sewer grates by more important people rushing to and fro.

Well, us and the man with the Red Right Hand,

but he was mostly concerned with the end of the world, and if you didn’t try to steal his weed he’d mostly leave you alone.

Now of course, out where there used to be naught but weeds and wires, there is a Sunday Morning After cottage industry, where you can find so much video and analysis that you can build yourself a nearly perfect, four-dimensional model of exactly what happened.

Should you choose to.

Although I can’t figure out why anyone would.

See, this is a puppet show. A Mouse Circus. And on any given Sunday, for all of the carbon dioxide expended, there is very little that isn’t utterly meaningless and drearily predictable -- everyone hunkered into their assigned roles, tossing wads of damp gray lumps of word-rags back and forth. Endlessly.

In other words, a perfect simulacrum of the the state of our national Big Media discourse in miniature.

Which is why I think the sidewalk fishermen -- those who pull little, silver treasures from the sludge -- will always remain on the margins, but will also always be relevant.

For example, one thing that went largely unmentioned at the Grownup's Table is the fact that, based on the color and cut of her Very Loud Jacket,

it would appear that Liz Cheney (who is now is listed on Fox News Sunday as a “Former State Department Official” instead of “Amoral Cyborg Hellspawn of the Old One”) has landed her herself a sweet job with a Big Name Realty company.

That, or she scored a gig at the Board of Trade, buying and selling hog futures or aluminum or the souls of the damned.

Either way, kudos to you, Cheney the Lesser.

Another thing that you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t been away from it for awhile is just how physically unwatchable Bill Kristol has become. I know his “smirking triumphantly over heaps of dead American soldiers” thing used to have a kind of thrilling, edgy, Master Race appeal to the typical Fox viewer, but these days the massive venom sacs in Kristol’s skull have grown so heavy that the nictitating membranes that protect his beady, lizard eyes from truth and honor have gotten freakishly thick and overhangish.

Also no amount of Botox -- whether applied with a needle, a SuperSoaker or a fire-hose -- is ever going to melt the Mark of Cain off of his Gorgon head.

Kristol opined that calling the Health Care Summit a dog and pony show was “an insult to dog and pony shows.” Because apparently people dying from mindless, lockstep Conservative obstruction of any kind of meaningful health care reform is hi-larious.

Kristol allowed as how President Obama looked “professorial” is his mastery of “alleged facts” at the Health Care Summit, which he “didn’t watch” because he “has a life”.

Well, if feeding off of the bloodshed and misery and fear he and his fellow Fox News incubi spread like a moral syphilis everywhere they go is a “life”, then I suppose he does.

Lastly there was the Lamar Alexander, who won the Great Big Whopping Republican Lie of the Week contest this week. Hand's down. Which was unexpected: Alexander usually comes across as somebody’s slightly nutty CPA grandpa, and not someone you’d expect to stab the truth in the neck on national teevee.

And yet that’s exactly what he did.

Remembering that the complete rewrite of American history to exonerate themselves and retroactively “confirm” their crackpot theories is the Great Project to which virtually all Conservatives are now fully committed, see if you can spot Alexander's contribution to that Project here in this exchange between himself and “This Week”'s substitute teacher, Elizabeth Vargas (which I have helpfully highlighted in the Teacher's Copy of this exam):

VARGAS: You also said in your remarks at the summit that Republicans have come to the conclusion that Congress, quote, "doesn't do comprehensive well," that our country is too big and too complicated for Washington. But Congress has passed many historic and sweeping and comprehensive bills in the past, Medicare, the civil rights bill, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Are you saying that this Congress is uniquely incapable of doing something sweeping and massive and dramatic?

ALEXANDER: Well, the answer's yes, in that sense.

VARGAS: That's not good.

ALEXANDER: But no -- but let me go back. You mentioned the civil rights bill. I was a very young aide here when President Johnson, who had more Democratic votes in Congress than President Obama had, had the civil rights bill written in Everett Dirksen's office. He was the Republican leader.

He did that not just to pass it. He did it to make sure that, when it was passed, it would be accepted by the people and there wouldn't be a campaign as there will be in health care to repeal it from the day it's passed.

Today I've watched the comprehensive immigration bill, I've watched the comprehensive economy-wide cap and trade, I've watched the comprehensive health care bill, they fall of their own weight, because we're biting off more than we can chew in a country this big and complex and complicated.

I think we do better as a country when we go step by step toward a goal, and the goal in this case should be reducing health care costs.

Wow.

Double fucking "Wow". With sprinkles.

So...according to Alexander's wingnut version of American History, Lyndon Johnson must not have been talking about the political Hell that was coming down the pike when he said "We have lost the South for a generation" after signing that civil rights legislation.

In Alexander's wingnut version of American History, that civil rights legislation did not increase by an order of magnitude the spin of the Social Justice Centrifuge

that had already been propelling southern, white racists out of the Democratic Party at least since Harry Truman integrated the Army.

In Alexander's wingnut version of American History, that civil rights legislation did not help spark one the most violent periods of American social unrest since the Civil War.

This nice man

was never shot in the head.

This evil man

was never propelled onto the national stage with the battle cry of "Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever."

In Alexander's wingnut version of American History, Wallace's thug army was never co-opted by Nixon to win the White House.

The Party of Lincoln never finally and fatally degenerated into the Party of Jefferson Davis.

And the Bigot and Bible Vote never became the electoral mainstay of the GOP

upon which they are now completely dependent.

In short, in Alexander's wingnut version of American History, the last 40 years never happened.

And how does Ace Journalist Elizabeth Vargas cope with this week's Great Big Whopping Republican Lie?

A Murrowesque outrage? Cronkite-ish Indignation? Roykoian guns blazing?

Not so much.

VARGAS: So the country has changed or Congress has changed?

Well, Elizabeth, there is no doubt that the country has changed.

And Congress.

But if you're looking for the group that is leading the charge down the rabbit hole into a dark age of malignant ignorance, you need look no further than the mirror.

At those journalists who obdurately refuse to call out Conservative lies.

Even when they are staring them right in the face.