Better Call Saul!

One of the predictable and hilarious side-effects of the Big Conservative Project to Destroy American has been that even the most proficient cookers and dealers of wingnut meth have started snorting/ shooting/ smoking/ pontificating their own product.

And the results aren't pretty.

Not


Pretty


At


All

Which why the Right could not survive for a single day as a cohesive political and cultural force without their Very Serious Centrist enablers in the mainstream media.  Because when you have fucked up as radically, frequently and publicly as Conservatives have, you don't need a public defender: you need a god damn, battle-hardened, professional dissembler whose lies come fast and easy, in Very Reasonable tones, nested one inside the next inside the next like an infinite series of Russian puzzle dolls.

You need a top-shelf, C-class, muthafuckin' artiste who can get caught red-handed (or baboon-assed) shitting himself in the village square at high noon, and by 12:05 can completely change  the subject to a new and excitingly different lie altogether.

From Marie Burns at the New York Times Examiner:

If the heart of David Brooks’ Friday column was a lie, the heart of his column today is irresponsible nonsense. It is its own sort of lie — not in its presentation of a “Dream President,” but in its pretense of a “Fantasy Congress,” one whose members can be moved by logic or patriotism or pragmatism or anything. 

From just about the only readable scrap of the WaPo still standing (emphasis added):

The Morning Plum: The false equivalence pundits are part of the problem
Posted by Greg Sargent on February 26, 2013 at 9:12 am

...

We’re now seeing a third technique appear: Acknowledge that Republicans are the uncompromising party, but assert that it’s ultimately on the President to figure out a way to either force Republicans to drop their intransigence or to otherwise “lead” them out if it.

Case in point: David Brooks. Last week Brooks was widely criticized for a “pox on both house” column in which he based his entire argument on the falsehood that Obama has no plan. Brooks repented for his error, and today he offers a good faith effort to describe what he’d like Obama to do to change things. It boils down to this:

My dream Obama wouldn’t be just one gladiator in the zero-sum budget wars. He’d transform the sequester fight by changing the categories that undergird it. He’d possess the primary ingredient of political greatness: imagination. The great presidents, like Teddy Roosevelt, see situations differently. They ask different questions. History pivots around their terms.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the prescriptions Brooks offers would really change the current dynamic, but at bottom, the suggestion that it’s all on the president to figure out a way to persuade Republicans to drop their intransigence is still a dodge. The idea that the President can necessarily bend Congress to his will is indeed a “dream.” It doesn’t reckon with the most fundamental question at the heart of all of this: What if there is nothing whatsoever that can be done by the president or anyone else to break the GOP out of its no-compromising stance?  This isn’t an unreasonable reading of the situation; it’s what Republicans themselves have confirmed, publicly and on the record — they will not concede a penny in new revenues, no matter what. And if this is the case — if the fundamental problem is that Republicans really do prefer the sequester to any compromise — isn’t it incumbent on commentators to explain this clearly and forthrightly to their readers?

...

When your business is cooking the wingnut meth that powers the Big Conservative Project to Destroy American, you don't want a criminal lawyer.

You want a criminal lawyer.