Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Fair and Balanced" edition.

At the Mouse Circus Sunday, the media got caught in the alley with its skirt hiked up over its head handing out free Conservative hump-hump.

Think I'm kidding?

Count 'em as we go.

On “This Week...”:

• Republican Ron Paul 
• Republican Michele Bachmann 
• Republican political analyst Matthew Dowd 
• Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress 
• Conservative Fox News stooge, Byron York Former 
• Iowa Republican Party political director, Craig Robinson 

On “Fox News Sunday”, no big surprise that was:

• Republican Rick Perry 
• Republican Ron Paul 
• Republican Michele Bachmann 

On "Face the Nation":

• Republican senator Rand Paul 
• Former Republican senator and current Romney mouthpiece, Jim Talent. 
• Former Republican representative and current Gingrich mouthpiece, J.C. Watts, 
• Mike Allen, of Republico Politico 
• John Dickerson, reporter 
• Norah O'Donnell, reporter-seeming confection
• David Yepsen, Director, former reporter  

On “Meet the Press”:

• Republican Rick Santorum Iowa 
• Republican party chair, Matt Strawn. 
• Kathie Obradovich, reporter 
• Republican strategist Mike Murphy 
• Conservative hack David Brooks, 
• And Mark Halperin, who is an all-around robot super-hack of such heroic proportions that Salon magazine named him their #1 Hack of the 2011 (he was #2 last year): 

...
What more is there to say about Mark Halperin?


He certainly hasn’t gotten any better since last year, when a panel of experts (me) named him the world’s second biggest hack. He’s still wrong about everything. He’s still shallow and predictable. He’s still both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race.


 Halperin spent 2011 gearing up for the presidential elections by parroting transparently lame spin from Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, insisting that Palin was really going to run for president and taking Trump’s farcical vanity “campaign” seriously as anything other than a time-wasting stunt. He still takes Mark Penn seriously as a wise campaign sage and not an amoral grifter. And he got in trouble for calling President Obama a “dick” on “Morning Joe,” because the president criticized the GOP at a press conference. (This after Halperin spends years writing columns calling him a weak-willed wimp, because he is a Democrat.) The worst thing was not that he called the president a dick, it was that the president hadn’t even been dickish.

As far as substance goes, well, if you wanted substance you'd have gotten up two hours before our weekly national political media fiasco and watched "Up with Chris Hayes", a sample of which I include
here:

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(video preceded by advertising)

Still, it was...bracing...to watch David Gregory's ball bearings begin to grind and sizzle as Rick Santorum lied to his face over and over again. Santorum -- who invokes the name of Almighty God no fewer that 117 times in every speech -- looked straight into Gregory's eyes and flatly asserted that every single problem in the world -- debt, deficit, unemployment, Iran, partisan vitriol, government gridlock -- were created with calculated intention by the Kenyan Usurper because he wants to destroy America. And the last, few shovels-full of flaming bullshit apparently exceeded even Gregory's legendary capacity to ignore Republican perfidy and he went a little off (h/t Heather at Crooks and Liars):

What do you know? We actually got some pushback for once from David Gregory on this week's Meet the Press when a Republican came on the air and just outright lied. GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum was giving the usual spiel about how President Obama is some great divider and doesn't want to work with Republicans -- which frankly, takes a lot of gall after the unprecedented level of vitriol, name calling and obstruction we've seen from the GOP, but then projection does seem to be the one thing they're good at -- and then claimed that Obama had hasn't met with Republicans in six months. As Gregory reminded Santorum, the debt ceiling talks "over the summer were a constant set of meetings, so that can't be accurate." To which Santorum immediately backtracked and said that it was a few months since he's met with them instead.

Santorum may have lost the capacity to distinguish the truth from the frothy anal mix that is constantly bubbling out of his pie hole, but he knows his Base very well and he knows what they need to hear from a candidate to get them to the polls on election day.

Over on Fox, Ron Paul talked AIDS, promiscuity and socialism (from what I could gather, a free society depends on the "right" to catch a disease, be denied insurance and die in agony because the best palliative for plague is laissez-faire capitalism)...

...while over on "This Week..." Ron Paul swore that he had no idea who wrote the "Ron Paul Newsletter", or what was in it, and vigorously disavowed the few "bad sentences" that elves or aliens or the CIA had managed to slip into them.

(You know, having edited newletters for active and interested groups, it is hilarious to me that anyone could believe me that after the first batch of Klanspeech bullshit went out under Ron Paul's name, he didn't hear a single fucking word back -- either in horror or support -- from his large, boistrous and opinionated readership. But then again, to be a Paulite you have to be able to believe three impossible things before breakfast every day, so I wouldn't look for their ardor to dim any time soon. )

Back on "Meet the Press", David Gregory averred that "This is a campaign about Big things!" while David Brooks thinks this it is "a values-thing" and Mark Halperin sees "buckets of scenarios".

Well, so do I.