"Leftovers again?!" edition.
This weekend at the Mouse Circus, elite political flapdoodle was ably defended along every front.
It is an odd thing, our national Sunday political rituals: everyone who pays attention and knows the facts knows it's a fraud, while everyone who does their citizenship fastfastfast at the political drive-thru window, grabbing whatever is on-offer by white guys in suits, takes these frauds seriously.
And so we find John Meacham on "Meet the Press" living up to the scurrilous rumor that every day he sends his valet back to the closet in search of something even more gray. The bland, gray Meacham predictably divides the the fault for the failure of our political system equally between the GOP -- for their implacable opposition to anything and everything -- and Barack Obama -- for failing* to "establish and emotional connection" to the Murrican people.
Across the table, aging historians alternately rhapsodized about their favorite dead presidents (Teddy Roosevelt would never have put up with this shit!) and played the irrelevant historical comparison game (You know, Franklin Pierce had unusually large feet too!)
Michael Eric Dyson picked up an easy nickle as MTP's "designated Leftie" and dared to use the word "racism" in the same sentence as a critique of the Shining Path Conservatives...
...while Rich Lowry (his oozing poison sacs lightly corked for grownup teevee and his soda-straw lizard tongue and nictitating membranes flicking and twitching in what could only be described as a very lonely little boy's imitation of St. William Buckley as secretly practiced a thousand times in front of Mom's makeup mirror) nodded like a Drinking Bird in a barbershop window and argued for the millionth time that the "Tea Party" is some brand-new political entity which arose in spontaneous and righteous reaction to the horrors of the Kenyan Usurper (and to some unspecified excesses of the Bad, Old Republicans that we somehow never heard a fucking word about back when those Bad, Old Republicans were in power) and that the mere existence of Herman Cain is an invincible Patronus spell against all charges that even a single drop of racism exists within the sanctified body of the Church of Reagan.
Dyson's incoherent. non sequitur "rebuttal" -- something about Obama, Rodney King and the "politics of chill" delivered in his hobo-tired blank-verse Jesse Jackson-lite singsong cadence and hobo-tired Benihana-chef-cutting-up-veggies-at-your-table gestures -- was distinctly unhelpful to the cause.
But he was on teevee and you weren't and that is all that matters.
Elsewhere, Chris Matthews mentioned that Rush Limbaugh is a racist who is very successful because he does his little, goosestep fan dance for a large, angry racist audience and Andrew Sullivan thinks the GOP's hatred of women, gays, Latinos and blacks will doom them.
Which would be sorta edgy...if this were 1986.
On "This Week...", Colin Powell played it 100% safe by moaning how our politics is now hostage to the "extremes" of both the Left and the Right. Christiane Amanpour actually pointed out that it was, in fact, one group -- the Teabaggers -- inside of one political party -- the GOP -- who had turned compromise a political death-sentence. Former Secretary of State Powell -- looking like he was trying unsuccessfully to poop out a medium-sized cactus -- allowed as how that sentiment ain't how you win Presidential elections.
(For the benefit of future historians, the whole idea that in 2011 everyone was still playing the "Winning Presidential election" game was a strange, antebellum fantasy which our Elite Overlords could not admit -- even as one GOP crackpot-candidate-of-the-week rose and vanished before their eyes like Dengue fever dreams -- had been stomped to bits by a mob of bigots, carnival barkers and oligarchs who were not remotely interested in the tedious business of governance.)
This Centrist poison is everywhere: as pervasive and pernicious as the "We're winning in Iraq!" treason was seven years ago -- and mouthed by most of the same craven hogs feeding at the same establishmentarian trough -- "Both Sides Do It" is our elite media's Loyalty Oath. Without it, virtually no critique of our gutshot democracy is permitted anywhere inside their moldering empire (From the NYT with emphasis added):
Craven Political Crudités
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: November 26, 2011
...
Buckle up, folks. This presidential race is shaping up to be an especially mean and mendacious ride, and not just because the two Republicans currently in the lead, Romney and Newt Gingrich, have demonstrated a formidable talent for improvisation, starting with thorough revisions of their own positions on health care, climate change and such. They’re a limber duo, primed to teach classes on political yoga. Gingrich’s wife probably gave him a Tiffany-bejeweled mat.
But their specific contortions and distortions are no more worrisome than the backdrop against which this campaign unfolds, one of toxic partisanship and breathless hyperbole.
Romney has been on the receiving as well as the giving end of this: last month, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee...
"Both Sides Do It" is also the quicklime they shovel by the ton onto a mass grave of big, ugly truths to cover the stink of their empire rotting away beneath their feet.
All of which proved once again that "[Getting] Up with Chris Hayes [before the farm reports]" -- in the grand tradition of best of the Liberal blogosphere -- is still plying his trade on an entirely plane of existence and setting a bar for funny, intelligent Sunday political salon so far above everything else that no one at the Mouse Circus dares to even acknowledge it.
* Thanks, Mike K.
9 comments:
looking like he was trying unsuccessfully to poop out a medium-sized cactus
Wowzers! That's exactly what he looked like as I clicked him off the screen.
What's the over/under on UP? I got even money that Chris is on Current with K.O. by July. The "UP format" will be kept by MSNBC and hosted by Nooners. Her panel will include that week's healthy scratches from Press the Meat's Villager rolodex.
The torture never stops.
DG, quick question:
In your line "for failubg to", is it the "b" or the "g" in "failubg" that is silent? Or it is a Lefty Commie French type word where the last consonant is silent unless followed by a vowel? Please let me know so I can start using the new DriftSpeak this week.
Thank you most kindly,
Mike.K.
"looking like he was trying unsuccessfully to poop out a medium-sized cactus " That was so good, I can see it now. I don't/can't actually watch that stuff, but I have been exposed.
Frank Bruni? You excerpted a Bruni column? That GWBush fanboy spent the 2000 election with his nose up gW's butt while his NYT op-Ed mates were busy telling lies about Al Gore.
God, he's pathetic. And about 12 years late. He may be gay but he is also stupid.
An A to Z of Theory Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: A Critical Theory of Myths
Barthes lists seven common techniques or figures of myth:
1) Inoculation – admitting a little bit of evil in an institution so as to ward off awareness of its fundamental problems. For instance, admitting the existence of ‘a few bad eggs’ in the police so as to cover up the abusive nature of official police practices.
2) Removing history – making it seem like social phenomena simply ‘exist’ or are there for the viewer’s gaze, eliminating both causality and agency. Neoliberalism, for instance, is often treated as ‘globalisation’ or ‘modernisation’, as an abstract economic necessity rather than a political strategy.
3) Identification of the other with the self – projecting inner characteristics onto the other. For instance, in trials, treating a deviant person as a version of the self which has gone astray, based on a view of crime as rooted in human nature. The actual person, their motives and meanings are written out of such accounts.
4) Tautology – treating the failure of language as expressing the essence of a thing – “theatre is theatre”, “Racine is Racine”, or “just because, is all”. Barthes believes this device is an order not to think.
5) Neither-norism – refusing radical differences between phenomena by combining them in a kind of middle ground marked by immobility and permanence. The Third Way is a current example.
6) Quantification of quality – treating differences in kind as differences in degree.
7) Statements of fact without explanation – ‘that’s just the way it is’. The idea of ‘common sense’ is used to command the pursuit of truth to stop at a certain point.
Oh, Obama established an emotional connection with the voters...that's part of why he got elected with that landslide in 2008
The problem is, that he THEN connected emotionally with his inner "bipartisan" self and has spent the ensuing three years spreading cheek for the republicans and their agenda of preserving the status quo.
And no amount of idiot bullshit from the right about his being a "socialist" is going to change that truth about him.
Every day/
He sends his valet/
Back to the closet in search of more gray.
Seriously, driftglass, I googled that to see which poet you were lifting it from. :-)
When Grover Norquist says taxes are to high, why does no one say "compared to Mexico and Chile yes are they your models for America?"
is still plying his trade on an entirely plane of existence and setting a bar for funny, intelligent Sunday political salon so far above everything else that no one at the Mouse Circus dares to even acknowledge it.
The negative first: His format of surrounding himself with a group of 4 and having a discussion/dialog is just plain crowded. I often find myself lost in a tangle of voices competing to be heard as they often crowd and stumble over each other's words. Done well, it's marvelous, but very hard to control it.
Positive: Agreed, best news and discussion WRT the topics of the day by light-years. I did see a few minutes of This Week with CA interviewing Pat Toomey of PA. All "what's that you say, Mr. Toomey" and no "you're spouting BS".
Please, Chris, no more than a couple of guests, unless your topic needs more.
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