Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

"There. Are. Four. Lights." Edition (h/t Malacandra)

The other day I was out at a local beach.

At that beach, there were various groups of people – some white and some black -- engaged in various peaceable activities.

During the few moments I observed the activities not a single person pulled out a gun and started shooting.

So what can we learn from this?

Well, according to Ace Journalist David Fucking Brooks, it must mean there is no homicide problem in Chicago!

Which would be awesome if it were in any way remotely true.

Homicide rate jumps in Chicago, Daley pushes for more gun control

By Mark Guarino | Published Wed, Apr 28 2010 9:30 am

CHICAGO — The homicide rate in Chicago has jumped in the past month, and the city is grappling with how best to respond.

At least two weekends in a row have been marred by multiple killings. For many Chicagoans, the breaking point was last Wednesday, when a 20-month-old girl was shot in the head while in a parked car on the South Side. The alleged gunman, who turned himself in, was reportedly aiming for the girl’s father.

As of last Sunday, Chicago tallied 113 homicides for 2010, compared with 101 for the same period last year.

The city’s mayor, state lawmakers, and the Chicago Police Department, among others, are weighing in on what should - and shouldn’t - be done.
…

This Sunday at the Mouse Circus, E.J. Dionne very carefully and methodically laid out the problem with our media… (the link is here, but NBC has completely screwed up the attributions on its transcript, swapping the names of people and what they actually said almost at random.)

Dionne: We can't have a good discussion on race if the facts don't matter. And I think it's, it's not only that Shirley Sherrod was smeared, it was a perverse smear. Because, if you look at that speech, what she was giving is a speech about racial reconciliation. She was saying poor blacks and poor whites have a lot in common. And this was twisted into a, an allegation, false allegation that she was somehow a black racist.

Now, what's going on here? I think the traditional media are so afraid of being called liberal, God forbid they be called liberal, that they are willing to run with any kind of right-wing propaganda and treat it as news. Challenging propaganda, or not running it, or taking your time before you run with a story, that's not liberalism, that's journalism. And I think that the right has been running this campaign for 30 years, they've had a lot of success, and we should worry about it. With the--you got to look over both shoulders, and you got to look at the facts.

Now hold the camera still for just a moment and watch as David Fucking Brooks practically shits himself and does the Electric Slide in his own offal at the idea that his Bullshit Centrism Fantasy-land bubble is being directly and cogently breached….

Bobo: There's not only a right-wing squabble media. I mean, there's a squabble culture out there. There's regular media--we were trained in one media. When I started working in Chicago, we were given a phrase: If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. And so that's it. That--you would never run an excerpt from a speech unless you saw the speech. That's just unthinkable.
...
So we were trained in a certain way. A different sort of media, squabble culture, has come up on the left and the right, which, which decides their--they build audience by destroying other people. They don't know anything about policy, they don't care about government, they just want that squabble.

Got that kids? It isn’t the Conservative media that is wrecking this country: it’s the “squabble media”.

What was genuinely breathtaking was David Fucking Brooks’, well, bravado, at citing the famous motto of the Chicago News Bureau (that now-sadly defunct, hardbitten-reporter factory) -- “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out” -- just before proceeding to pull miles and miles of ridiculous and utterly unsupported Centrist claptrap straight out of his ass.

Bobo: So we were trained in a certain way. A different sort of media, squabble culture, has come up on the left and the right, which, which decides their--they build audience by destroying other people. They don't know anything about policy, they don't care about government, they just want that squabble.

See! See! The Right AND the Left do it! The Right AND the Left “don't know anything about policy". The Right AND the Left
“don't care about government”.

Not one statistic.
Not one correlation.
Not one fact.
Not one blurry security camera video of what might have been the shadow cast by a fact.
Not one artist's sketch of what some witnesses believe a fact might look like.
Not one of fact's neighbors telling the evening news that "Fact was kind of a loner who kept pretty much to himself."

Nothing.

Over the last six years since I got my "squabble media" credentials and began trying really hard to ruin everything good about America, every blogger I know has written hundreds or thousands of posts asking/begging/demanding that someone, somewhere on the Right show us this correlation, year-by-year for the last 30 years: Where was the Left’s Limbaugh? Where was the Left’s Falwell? Where was the Left’s Atwater? The Left’s Liddy? The Left’s Murdoch? The Left’s Coulter? The Left’s Impeachment Fetish? The Left’s Gingrich? The Left’s Beck? The Left’s fucking “Fox and Friends”?

I could go on for hours. Any of us could. As I have said many times elsewhere, the reason Conservative Establishmentarian Testicle Cozies like David Fucking Brooks work as hard as they do seven days a week to keep this Giant Lie propped up is that, the instant it falls apart, they lose their jobs and have to go out and get honest work.

They know that being forced to answer this question honestly is the Karate Kid Crane Kick of political debate:

"If do right, no can defense"

Which is why they are far, far too cowardly to ever step into a genuine arena with anyone armed with the facts.

To his credit, E.J. Dionne tried hard.

Dionne: Look, there is a concerted conservative campaign on part of the movement, a minority of the movement…to use race to split people. Glenn Beck says Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." J. Christian Adams, a Republican activist pushing this new Black Panthers story, says the Obama Justice Department is motivated by a "lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." Now, there are people playing with this racial politics out there. I am not saying, the NAACP certainly isn't saying that this is the whole conservative movement…or most of the conservative movement or most of the tea party. But it's a part of this strategy, and people should condemn it.

Got that? Dionne shows up with actual, representative quotes from real Conservative leaders with real media and electoral power.

So how will that clear, well-documented and devastating argument be rebutted by Ameroica's Most Reasonable of Conservatives? He who took the trouble to enunciate “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out” as his Golden Journalistic Rule?

Bobo: There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of tactics, too.
...

Really? Who? Name some. Quote some.

Bobo: Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a warm Sunday afternoon.
...

Got that? David Fucking Brooks -- easily the most ubiquitous "Reasonable" Conservative spokesman in America -- absolutely will not touch that question with a 10-foot Gallup Poll. Instead, Bobo airily asserts that, somehow, Glenn Beck and J. Christian Adams don’t methodically play on the fear, racism and paranoid of millions of Pig People for personal and partisan gain...because Bobo saw some people getting along on the Mall in D.C. once.

Just as Chicago does not have a homicide problem, because I went for a walk on the beach the other day and no one was murdered at my feet.

Of course, when the going got too tough for Bobo to handle by himself, host Dancin’ David Gregory leaped in to help his pal and underscore -- also without a single supporting fact or quote -- that Liberals are always just as kooky and angry and unhinged and Conservatives.

I don’t blame Dionne. He tried, but he simply does not have the killer instinct to lock onto a target and refuse to back off until they concede the point or run away crying.

And so, once again, America's timorous, brain-dead Center was reassured that squatting in the middle and loathing both the fact-and-policy-based Left and the fact-free-and-bigoted-Right equally makes them fucking outstanding Americans!

And once again I sit in front of the teevee machine shouting this:


Because no matter how many times asshats who have been handed terrifying media firepower like Brooks and Gregory insist that there are five lights...no matter how many times we are told to that we are bad people if we won't shut up and go along...just say it...just go roll over...just give in...even if you don't mean it just say it and the pain will stop...

...There. Are. Four. Lights.

And there always will be.