Sunday Morning Comin' Down

The Gingrich Rules.



Once upon a time in sport of professional basketball, there existed a thing called "The Jordan Rules".  It was a special strategy developed by Chuck Daly of the Detroit Pistons to cope with one person -- Michael Jordan.  To smother him, double-team him every time he touched the ball and play him as "physical" as possible (short of actually decking him) every minute he was on the floor.

In the game of professional punditry there also clearly exists a special set of rules designed with one person on mind.  Or, rather, one sort of person: Conservatism's parade of bomb-throwing, hate-mongering, race-baiting bottom feeders.  That breed which makes their daily bread from grifting the Pig People by generating an endless flood of books, magazine articles, broadcasts, speeches and videos all telling the GOP base over and over again that them their bigotries are noble and their paranoia is patriotic.

Of course, part of the downside of wallowing in the wingnut sewer and trafficking in slander and lies is that, sooner or later, you become a toxic mess.  Your stink becomes unacceptable to the general public, which s where the Sunday morning talk shows -- the Mouse Circus -- comes in.   Because despite having long ago devolved into a sinkhole of Beltway centrist twaddle, it is still viewed by altogether too many people as a bastion of Very Serious people -- it's the strip-mall of political opinion where casual shoppers go to feel smart and validated.

And so a bargain is struck; the bottom feeders deliver a temporary hike in the only thing these show's owners really care about -- audience share -- and, in exchange for being teevee friendly and keeping the worst of their batshit crazy on a leash for a few minutes, their Mouse Circus deburrs the bottom feeders' public image, replates and burnishes their credibility and temporarily transfuses them with Seriousness, which can then be redeemed at ten times its face value back among the Pig People.

And in the key to that bargain we find "The Gingrich Rules":



an agreement that the moderator will never, ever ask the bomb-throwing, hate-mongering, race-baiting goon sitting directly across from them a single question about their bomb-throwing, hate-mongering or race-baiting activities.  Instead they will be represented to the public merely as a Conservative commentator or talk radio host or pundit who, at worst, might be known for some "controversial" opinions, which the moderator will never bothers to explicate.

Here's how it works (from me in 2010):

Establishmentarian Marionette David Gregory  

asked “But don’t we have to have an Adult Conversation, with people...?” of a panel composed almost entirely of has-beens, sell-outs and depraved thugs he himself had assembled. ...

Newt Gingrich said --

“People can disagree without being demagogues.”

-- and David Gregory did not come across the table at him with a fucking machete, which brings us to the central plot of today's Mouse Circus: The Biannual Rehabilitation of Newt “Fundamentally. Profoundly. Basically.” Gingrich by David Gregory.
...

Since the beginning of recorded time, Newt Gingrich has been a real curve-breaking innovator

in Republican lying, adultery, hypocrisy, racism and demagogy.

He also hasn't held a single elected office since "Ally McBeal" was on the air.

In case you are just skimming past en route to Alpha Centauri and have no idea about who or what a "Newt Gingrich" is, he is a multiply-humiliated Republican personality who gloms onto whatever wingnut conspiracy theory or demagogic lunacy Fox News is peddling this week and lends it a portion of his ever-diminishing credibility.

He then collects money for rolling in his own shit until the results get too horrifying for even the clowns who run the American news media to ignore.

Then he goes in the Villager enalty box for awhile, until the clowns who run the American news media wear the corners off of their short list of Conservative and "moderate" ass-lickers and apple polishers, and need someone to come on to add a little "fizz" to their stupefyingly turgid and deeply dishonest puppet show.

Then the clowns who run the American news media draw straws to see who gets to let "Nazi" Newt out of the penalty box this time.

And then the Circle of Corporate Media Fake Journalism Life is Complete.

Meanwhile...Newt Gingrich’s infamous "Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonial..." and"Muslim=Nazi" comments have now officially been Unremembered.

In 2009, it was Michele Malkin's turn to have her sins shriven and her hellbeast past officially Unremembered.

A few weeks ago, Ann Coulter's number came up:

If your idea of biting-into-aluminum thrill-seeking is peeping through the curtains of a post-apocalyptic abattoir-cum-knocking shop after closing time to see what sorts of slithery, unnatural things clamber up from the basement in the gloaming hours, then the Mouse Circus was the place for you Sunday for one reason:  Ann Coulter. 

Ms. Coulter makes her way in the world by plying her one, very specific skill: scuttling from one microphone to the next, wrapping herself around it like a hagged-out "Alien" face-hugger, ramming her screechy, Conservative ovipositor into her audience's ears and laying her loathsome eggs in their skulls. 

And most of the time, there she remains...skittering around and around the wingnut welfare circuit over and over again from Hate Radio to Fox teevee, with an annual stop at Regnery press feeding trough to extrude books like "Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America", "Godless: The Church of Liberalism", "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism"and so forth...day after day offering the same gnarly, bile-soaked handjobs to the same imbeciles in the back alleys on the wrong side of town... 

...until the day comes -- as it inevitably does -- when the big, air-conditioned, network teevee limo sighs to a stop next to her, pops the door open and offers her another chance to take her freakshow uptown.

And yesterday, up-and-coming wingnut Bedlam princess, Dana Loesch, completed her climb to the top of the media dung heap by planting her "Gingrich Rules" flag on "The Week..."

From Mr. Charles P. Pierce at Esquire:

...Ms. Loesch, obviously believing herself to be addressing her usual audience of infirm shut-ins, made her case in what appeared to be the opening passages from a lost Richard Brautigan novel.

And — and you want to talk about gaffes. Here we have 41 straight months of unemployment that's been over 8 percent, which was — the stimulus was supposed to have fixed. In terms of gaffes, it's not good to have the president get up in front of people during an election cycle and say, well, if you have a small business, you didn't built that, or as some have tried to say, oh, he took — the Republicans took something out of context. He was talking about the Clinton tax plan, which really actually in context it's even worse, because he really was referring to his own plan, and the Clinton tax plan, we could — we could get into...

And thus, in the thickets of that answer, did hundreds of small woodland creatures find a safe home
...

As cute as bug's teeth and 100% teevee ready, Ms. Loesch was an acolyte and employee of the late Andrew Breitbart:

Loesch hosts The Dana Show: The Conservative Alternative, which broadcasts on KFTK FM NewsTalk 97.1 to the Greater St. Louis area. In October 2010, Loesch also became editor-in-chief of Big Journalism, one of the conservative group blogs created by Andrew Breitbart. In February 2011, CNN hired Loesch, Will Cain, and Democratic strategist Cornell Belcher, as political analysts in preparation for its 2012 election coverage. Loesch was specifically hired to represent the Tea Party point of view.

Loesch is a national leadership team member of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. On December 6, 2011, the St. Louis Tea Party, with which Loesch had been affiliated, announced that they and Loesch had mutually terminated their relationship.

whose now makes her living on the radio and saying things like this

LOESCH: Looking especially at how some of our foreign policy has been handled, Hillary Clinton essentially siding with the Muslim Brotherhood candidate in Egypt, and then it was discovered that her top aide -- Huma Abedin -- is essentially a member of the female version of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Sisterhood. All of this -- it seems enough to me to pose questions as to why our government is becoming so close with a group that has been so hostile to the United States, has fought against the United States, has sided with terrorists, and is a very oppressive regime that believes in Sharia law.

and this

Loesch argued – and at times spoke over – her guest until finally she declared: “Kay, I know you hate Christ but if you're unable to prove your argument that's on you. … You need to prove or I'm going to have to drop you because now you're boring me. You called in and said that Christ is hateful, you're not a Christian, and you just said you hated Christ.”

“I don't want false Christians. These are the people that make people hate God. Kay is the type of person that ran people like me off from church. Kay is the type of person that embarrasses the faith. I'm just saying: read it in the gospels, it's in the book of Matthew.”

five days a week, from coast to coast.

This is still a free country and like Mr. Gingrich, Ms. Malkin, Ms, Coulter and hundreds of others, Ms. Loesch is an unabashed, hard-core right-wing propagandist who is, of course, entirely free to make her living whispering her particular brand of sweet crazy into the ears of America's orc army Conservative bigots and imbeciles until they get tired of her and move onto the next shiny thing.

On the other hand, as long as our Serious Beltway Media continues to peddle Centrist snake oil (again from Mr. Charles P. Pierce)

Meanwhile, Ruth Marcus summed up her entire career in journalism with one sentence:

I think that there's red flags on both sides.

Of course, you do. That's how you get promoted at the Washington Post. Well, that, and wanting to blow the shit out of Iran.

and as long as "The Gingrich Rules" remain in effect, the Mouse Circus deserves nothing but a continuous rain of hellfire contempt from everyone who still loves and remembers real journalism and fears for this nation's future.