Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Dean of the Dead" Edition.

This Sunday, the word came down "ex cathedra" from the Beltway's new Dean of the Dead and official Broderite necromancer, Tom Brokaw, that the Mainstream Media will be on-board with the Republican program of massive and sustained lying, just as long as they keep the ratfucking out of the front parlor and don't startle the horses in the street.  

MR. BROKAW:  One of the problems I have, in fact, was though-- was that, Carly [Fiorina], with all due respect, was that for example, Congressman Ryan overreached a couple of times and got caught in those overreaches...

Only in the dustiest and most desolate basement of the King's English does the definition of what Paul Ryan did ("Lying") overlap in any way with Tom Brokaw's craven, puff-pastry euphemism ("Overreach") for Paul Ryan's lying.  To any long-time observer of the social habits of the Beltway petting zoo, Mr. Brokaw is not running away from the word "lying" because like "Lily Ledbetter" and "LGBT", it uses that "L"-sound that Mr. Brokaw is so comically unable to say.  Instead, as Heather from "Crooks and Liars" points out:

David Broder might be gone, but I think after this week, between his performance on Morning Joe playing the false equivalency game and now his excusing of Paul Ryan's lies in an extremely lame rebuttal to Newt Gingrich and Carly Fiorina's hackery on this Sunday's Meet the Press -- we can rightfully crown Tom Brokaw the new king of High Broderism. 

Or at least the king for this week. There are too many others out there lined up to regularly take his place among the beltway Villagers in the media. Apparently lying your ass off for an entire speech to the point where everyone knows your hair's on fire whether they want to admit it or not is now "overreaching."

Of course, the whole panel wasn't just bad, but David Gregory-brand awful.

Gingrich lied:

MR. GINGRICH:  You know, this is-- but this is one of the great myths to this city.  The president got the stimulus plan he wanted with no elected official having read it.  He got every single dollar, every single power.  The President rams through Obamacare, the largest change in the size of government in modern times, got it done.  The-- the reason people say he didn’t get anything done is it is failing.  I mean, Liberals can’t get up and say, gee, we passed everything we wanted to under-- under the Democratic House and Democratic Senate, and in 2010, we were repudiated and by the way, none of it worked.  

From Carly Fiorina (borrowing Peggy Noonan's alky-Carole-Channing whisper for the occasion) lied:

MS. FIORINA:  But I think what is absolutely fair is to say that President Obama, for two years, had a Democratic-controlled Senate and a democratically controlled House.  So it wasn’t a question of Republican intransigence.  They didn’t have the power to stand in his way.

But since, as usual, no Liberal was invited to the party, no one was there to stand up for the Truth: no one there to try to shame David Gregory into doing his damn job, to ask Tom Brokaw why Paul Ryan's lies ruffle his petticoats but Gingrich's do not, or to just stuff Fiorian's lies and Gingrich's lies back down their throats.

There was only Tom Friedman and his Mighty Mustache of Understanding

Oh my sweet, skiffle-playing Jesus:

MR. FRIEDMAN:  Yeah, you know, David, I-- I’ve read all those articles this morning and I find them interesting, because, in one of the critiques I’ve had of President Obama myself is that, one of the lines you get to the White House is, you don’t understand how bad those Republicans are.  They’ve been trying to block us from day one.  To which I say I totally get it.  It’s-- it’s, you know, it’s obvious to me.  I have one question, why are they getting away with it?  Why is the American public not sharing your view?  And one of the things I’ve never understood is why the president never leveraged the American people.

Maybe, Tom, the reason "leveraging the American people" hasn't worked so great is that because for the last few decades the means of reaching and persuading the American people -- the media -- has been occupied by a hostile force bent on suffocating that lovely ide in the crib.

Maybe you recognize some of members of that hostile forces sitting, as they were, right across the table from you this morning.  

Maybe because every single fucking time anyone tries to "leverage the American people" into, say, demanding that Conservative liars and traitors and frauds be held to account for their lies and betrayals, the Beltway media has made sure that message gets smothered in the crib by overpaid, talent-starved, job-for-life, "Both Sides Do It" Centrist trolls.

Like, say, Thomas L. Friedman.  

Here are a couple of sample of links drawn from across internet, but Tom Friedman's world-class hackery and cartoonish incompetence has been such a pillar of the internet for so long that a simple search for "Tom Friedman" and "Centrism" or "Iraq" or "Hack" will yield you literally thousands of others.

From "The Plum Line":

The Centrist Dodge

... 

How does Friedman deal with the fact that he and Obama roughly share the same vision? There’s the above approach — pretend Obama hasn’t been clear about what he wants. Friedman has adopted other dodges, too. He has claimed that Obama’s version of the Grand Bargain doesn’tgo far enough, because a Grand Bargain absolutely must contain entitlements cuts. Again, Obama and Dems have signaled a willingness to cut entitlements, dismaying many on the left. And even when Friedman admits that Republicans are more to blame for the lack of compromise, he makes up for it by somehow simultaneously claiming that “history” will hold Obama more accountable for failure to reach a deal. 

Friedman would not have to resort to such contortions if he would just admit the obvious: Obama and Dems are the ones who roughly inhabit the ideological middle, as Friedman himself has defined it. Friedmanagrees with them on the broad strokes of what need to be done. 

Paul Krugman recently wrote that anyone who pretends that one side isn’t far more responsible than the other for what’s happening right now is "part of the problem.” Coming from a columnist as influential as Friedman, the claim that we don’t know what Obama wants in the way of deficit reduction, and the suggestion that this is a key reason the supercommittee is careening towards failure, are deeply irresponsible and risk badly misinforming the public.

Eschaton:

The One True Wanker of The Decade
Friedman possesses all of the qualities that make a pundit truly wankerific. He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites. 

Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything.The important thing about an issue is whether it proves Tom Friedman fucking right, but if it doesn't we can just move on to the next big thing that will prove Tom Friedman fucking right. If you advocate for wars that go a bit bad, well, it's not your fault. If only Tom Friedman had been in charge everything would have been great.  

Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.

Across the dial reactions varied, but they stayed within the acceptable Beltway Villager parameters:  for example, George Will did everything but a victory dance around a pile of burning books to celebrate the coming of the New Dark Age, while unfailing obedient Republican sock-puppet Matthew Dowd got a little squeamish, pulling a face like he had bitten into a live rat and making vague noises about "stretching  the truth" (I have a strong feeling that somewhere out there, someone higher up the GOP food chain is having a chat with Mr. Dowd and explaining to him the finer points of the terms "Faustian" and "bargain" -- 




-- the two words by which his career, and so many others, hang [video is Not Safe for Work].)

This is why Sunday was a kind of a Big Fucking Deal.

It signaled exactly how the Beltway media -- the same bilge-peddlers who gleefully sold popcorn at every wingnut witch hunt during the Clinton years and closed their eyes, hid under the bed and sucker their collective thumbs as the Bush regime rampaged across the pages of history -- plan to handle the Bullshit Blitzkrieg 

that is to coming to a teevee screen near you.

Prepare for an ugly Fall.