Voice of Empire, Ctd. -- UPDATE*

Sunday Morning Comin' Down: One more "It's Both Sides" rerun.

America's Mouse Circus -- now in chewable, concentrated, Liberal-proof doses.

On "Meet the Gregory", Fluffy shows how to frame a question like a very fancy prostitute:

On the one hand, some people say that Republicans are fucking nuts. That they are completely unreasonable.

On the other hand, they say that someone has to draw a line in the sand against the deficit that has been run up by President Obama.

* Here is the actual Fluffy quote --

I mean so many people I talk to are frankly disgusted with Washington. You know, you have on the one side people saying that-- that Republicans are-- are just crazy. That they won't negotiate. That they're being unreasonable. That they're denying the prospect of a default. Michelle Bachmann saying it's a misnomer when the Fed chief says it would be economic calamity.

And on the other side you-- you know, you've got Republicans saying, "Look, somebody's got to draw a line in the sand here. It's-- it's the Democrats who have run up-- the debt since President Obama got into office."

-- which would frankly be even more damning, if "damning" actually meant anything anymore. Because when you factor in the fact that the second half of Fluffy's "on the other hand" claptrap is simply a lie, what Gregory is really saying is this:

On the one hand, Republicans and their Pig People mob are intransigent sociopaths who are driving the country off a cliff because, wheeeeee!, why not!

On the other hand, Republicans and their Pig People mob are huge fucking liars whose whole filthy scam depends on getting everyone to pretend that history began on January 20, 2009.

How can compromise be found between these two positions?

Discuss!

Elsewhere, faced with the ruinous grimfuck unpopularity of the smelly little corner into which they have painted themselves, Republican Senator John Kyl and Republican Senator Tom Coburn explain that neither of them "care about the politics" of anything.

Everywhere, representatives of "The Tea Party" (reminder: There. Is. No. "Tea Party"; there is only the same, old, batshit GOP Base in tricorner hats) were invited on teevee to discuss their exciting ideas for destroying America immediately and to "balance out" the ideas of Royalist snivelers like George Will, who wants to destroy America more incrementally.

George Will (actual quote): "The Tea Party Movement...is the best thing to happen in American politics since the Goldwater Insurgency."

Speaking of Republican stooges, Matthew Dowd weighted in with this steaming pile of Villager Wisdom (lightly dramatized version):

The assumptions of Both Sides are wrong! Nowhere has history ever shown that cutting spending in a weak economy makes anything worse. Nowhere has history ever shown that tax cuts something something.

See!

It's both sides! It's both sides!

Except, of course, it turns out that the first half -- the anti-Liberal half -- of Dowd's "Both sides are wrong" excrement is a huge fucking lie:

When A Turn Toward Austerity Turned To Disaster

Published: July 16, 2011

by NPR Staff

Four years into Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential term, the worst of the Great Depression seemed behind him. Massive jolts of New Deal spending had stopped the economic slide, and the unemployment rate was cut from 22 percent to less than 10 percent.

"People felt that there was momentum," U.S. Senate historian Donald Ritchie tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. "Finally, there was the light at the end of the tunnel."

So Roosevelt, on the advice of his conservative Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, decided to tackle the country's exploding deficits. Over two years, FDR slashed government spending 17 percent.

"All of a sudden," Ritchie says, "after unemployment had been going steadily down, unemployment shot up, the economy stagnated, the stock market crashed again. And now it seemed we'd come out of the Hoover Depression to go into the Roosevelt recession."
...

What made this morning's helping of Dowd's usual, fact-free Republican horseshit extra tasty was that just after he told this particular huge fucking lie, Dowd decided to crawl up even higher on his High Beltway Horse and go on whiny little micro-rant about how nobody "in Washington" is "ever held accountable" for anything.

Mr. Dowd has obviously learned the Brooksian Art of Punditting well: That once you join The Club, it literally stops mattering which side of your mouth you lie out of.

Finally, the whole freakshow was once again seasoned to the point of gagging by a bunch of guests who randomly punctuate every damn sentence with "themurricanpeeple".

Once again, nowhere in any of the Mouse Circus' three-rings or sideshows was a single Liberal voice heard at all.

Sigh.

As long as people like David Gregory and Matthew Dowd continue to have jobs that don't involve welcoming me to my local big box store or trying to upsell me an apple pie with my Big Mac, our media is fucked.

You have now seen the Sunday Mouse Circus.