Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Seems like everybody took their pet Brit out for a walk today to explain in molecular detail some more about that which they have already been talking about for two weeks: the British elections.

Not that I care either way, but in the midst of an across-the-board coverage based on the de facto assumption that America should damn well feel very deeply about it, no one has actually explained to me – outside of its obvious entertainment value – exactly why the political fortunes of candidates in Euro DisnEyngland’s elections should matter to me at all.

Meanwhile, reporting breathlessly from the Alternate Fucktard Universe, Fox News swine made it clear that, by and large, the Right is still very much in favor of kicking suspicious people at random in the balls and stripping them of their citizenship, while dressed in full length American flag Ball gowns.

Bill Kristol remains stlwart in his conviction that any and all monsters hiding in the Neocon closet can be defeated with a smirk, invading a country or two, and otherwise wiping the Right’s bloody jackboots on the Constitution.

Dick Cheney’s unholy spawn chimed in with some choreographed tsk-tsking that “this President” is refusing to “lead” (Helpful Republican Translation: “lead” = “randomly beating people with claw hammers until they ‘confess’ to, say, blowing up oil platforms at the behest of Nancy al Pelosi and the SEIU”) and that “this President” has denied again and again that there are terrorists and terrorist networks.

Also too we’re not gonna be able to win this war until the President takes intelligence seriously!

Is any of this true at all?

Of course not. Liz Cheney learned her treasonous tradecraft at her war criminal daddy’s knee, and has found herself home on America’s own fully-fascist propaganda outlet.

And everyone knows it.

Does it make the slightest bit of difference?

Of course not.

She is on teevee. And in the end that’s all that counts.


On “Face the Nation” I’m sure something happened.

I have no idea what.


On “Meet the Press” , David Fucking Brooks mourned Bob Bennett’s loss in the Utah party convention, calling it a “damned shame”.

Twice.

Which, given Bobo’s aggressively Procrustean tepidity about everything, was like seeing him skull-fucking Maggie Thatcher during the Superbowl Halftime show and screaming out Karl Marx’s name at the moment of release.

Brooks rues the loss of a good Conservative; someone who stepped a couple of inches off the Wingnut and it cost him his career.

Well boo-fucking-hoo.

Maybe 20 long years after the horses have escaped, gone bloated, medieval and insane on a steady diet of Hate Radio and set up their own barbarian empire is the wrong time to think about drawing up plans for a barn door re-closure device, eh Bobo?

”The Chris Matthews Show” was meh.

Really, the most illuminating conversation of the day was an exchange between/among Lauren Ashburn (Sweater-filler-outer for USA Today), David Frum (ex-Bush speechwriter recently exiled from the Alternate Fucktard Universe for saying 2+2=4 out loud) and meanie liberal blogger John Aravosis that unintentionally lit up “Reliable Sources” for a few moments like a starburst shell in a shadow valley.

Frum complained that restraint is not “universal” on some stories; inventing imaginary standards for bloggers that apply to no one else, and then bitching that bloggers' unwillingness to adhere to his imaginary rules make it impossible for journalists to behave like grownups.

Or something. Because if “we don’t cover it, you know there’s some blogger out there who will.”

Aravosis got it right, pointing out that the Big Dollar media cops this same filthy plea every time they get caught being Republican lapdogs. He reminded Frum that he (Aravosis) is explicitly an "advocacy journalist”; that he overtly pushes a particular agenda and therefore has a different role to play than ABC/CNN.

Ashburn then gets all twitchy and shows journalism’s ugly ass when she whines that journalists should be Vewy Vewy Careful about calling out someone they’re interviewing for lying because someone, somewhere might call them a Dirty Fucking Hippie.

When asked point-blank about what a journalist should do when an interview pukes a huge lie right in your face, Lauren Ashburn of USA Today gives us the day’s money shot:

“You have to go to the other side.”

Begging again and for the 1,000,000th time the question: “What ‘other side’ are you talking about?”

Of course, once the emergence of a fully immersive, 24/7 Alternate Fucktard Universe was permitted, we were screwed and our modern world became inevitable. It has created a 2nd and 3rd generation of citizen so steeped in their own, impenetrable, paranoid death-spiral voodoo that anything anyone from former Vice Presidents and FEMA directors to drooling imbeciles waving “Obama = Hitler signs” shouts is automatically designated as “True” as long as it is laid on a foundation of unhinged hatred of Liberals generally and Obama specifically.

We used to have a national press that believed its job was to more-or-less monitor activity along that border, and to disallow lies from the badlands of Fringeylvania to swarm willy-nilly into the Mainstream.

But ever since the press became just another racket run by hustlers and pimps who recognize no metric for success but ratings (and consequently no difference between “news” and “pie fight”) Conservative lies have been left to gush unchecked and unchallenged directly into our national media.

So if you’re feeling a little alone and abandoned, it’s because you are; your national media abdicated its sacred duty long ago. They did it for money, discovering that “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” was no way to snag that seven-figure lifestyle and so instead opted to simply toss fragile, nuanced, complicated Truth into an unrefereed cage match with heavily-armed, corporate-funded Lies…and to let the market decide.

Matt Steinglass' explanation of the shoddy condition of the American media (h/t Sullivan)

I don’t know anything about the specific cases in which [Brad DeLong] feels some reporters at the Washington Post weren’t trying to get it right. But as a broad response, I would have to say: for most of us, the level of detailed and scrupulous reportage which he expects on every story entails an amount of work that almost no journalistic institution in the world will pay us enough to do, anymore.

This isn’t really a complaint; it’s more of an observation. The quality of reportage, both financial and otherwise, is going to keep going down. And it’s going to keep going down because there isn’t a market for quality reportage. It doesn’t pay any more to interview 10 sources for an article than it does to interview 5 of them.
...

-- strikes me as simultaneously correct, mealy-mouthed and ultimately beside the point.

So the upshot is that journalism has become "Office Space II": another slacker scut-work gig where you don't get paid enough to to a good job...so you just do a shitty job instead?

Except, of course, journalists are creatures of principle. First Amendment warriors, and not just another clique of careerist climbers so it can't just be that they're too lazy to bother, but are instead engaged in some kind of noble...soft...disorganized...strike?

What a load. This wouldn't fly for a minute if it were your pizza arriving cold, late and encrusted with rat droppings, or if your street remained unplowed a week after a blizzard and you found the snow-plow drivers hanging out at the bar bitching about their 401K.

But Hell, I'm a decent boss, so what's say we split the difference? You keep cutting corners reporting on the vital news of the day, but you agree that when someone is just fucking LYING, you'll call them on it. Bluntly and in print. You will lead with the headline that reads, say, "Bill Kristol Is A Lying Sack of Shit", as opposed to, say, giving Bill Kristol a byline in one major, national publication after another?

Of course this is never going to happen, because after eight years as Dick Cheney’s watch fob, and eight years before that as Limbaugh’s tackling dummy and Gingrich’s sock puppet, the idea that the problem with “journalism” might actually stem from the behavior of “journalists” is still way too scary to be allowed up from the minor leagues. But the truth is -- for a whole lot of reasons -- the national media is effectively dead and gone, and for the foreseeable future we Liberals will be stuck in the precarious position of being a civilized and relatively reasonable land sharing a long and porous border with barbarians.

And for the foreseeable future, creatures like Lauren Ashburn and David Frum will continue to be successful precisely because they have fully internalized the Fox News ideology.

Precisely because they have been bred without a conscience.