Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- UPDATE

The Jerry Dantana Hour Continues

Being a man on a budget, I'm always looking for a cheap laugh.

Watching Young Steve Kornacki lose control of his show?

Cheap laugh. 

Imagining  James Kirk whispering "Climate Change.  Marriage Equality.  Voting Rights.  Auto Bailout. Health Care. Chooooice." into the ear of the "Bush!Lied! so everything any Administration says about anything from now on is automatically a lie and fuck your fucking 'evidence' " crew?

Cheap laugh.

The price goes steeply up and the laughs evaporate when the subject gets down to the actual costs of taking any action in Syria.

I personally don't want any American military anything going anywhere near the place, but I am willing to listen to people making arguments to the contrary without assuming the only reason they are making those arguments is that Richard Perle slipped them a Ceti Alpha brainworm.

Yes, it was a disaster for our commonweal that the Bush Administration so methodically and spectacularly sabotaged public confidence in the government and debased the English language's storehouse of Scary Adjectives, just as it was a disaster for our commonweal that clowns like David Broder and David Brooks and David Gregory and Tom Friedman turned the whole idea of thoughtful moderation into (as one long-discredited hack once wrote) "an empty brand, pimped by hustlers.  A Potemkin construct.  A --

...Universe...carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth. 

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right. 

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists. 

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.

And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!

-- by using the weaponized Fake Centrism as suppressing fire for crazy people who were advancing depraved agendas.

It is also tragic that our public square is now so fucking bent that unreconstructed Neocon war wholesalers like Bill Kristol

still have an honored place at the "Meet the Press" table.  Because apparently Paul Wolfowtiz was busy and the Joker is fictional and the Gasbag Conclave long ago stopped being anything other than bad-acid Beltway establishment cartoon:

 

And if the state of our ability to have grownup conversations about anything weren't already enough to make a slab of granite weep, remember that any public debate on any subject is going to include several million meatsticks who think this -- 

Aspirin tax under Obamacare

Effective Jul 1, 2013, aspirin will be heavily taxed under Obamacare.
The only explanation given was that they are white and they work.

-- is the absolutely apex of wit.

Finally, since these days it just isn't a proper Mouse Circus without Glenn "Not The Story" Greenwald popping up somewhere to denounce the jackbooted thuggery of Barack Obama, I can only assume that the same person who publicly and preemptively mocked President Obama's Syria policy based on speculation that he would not be taking his case to Congress

The 2008 version of Obama agrees RT @chucktodd And 79% believe Pres. Obama should be required to get Congress' approval before acting.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 30, 2013

The Constitution agrees RT @chucktodd And 79% believe Pres. Obama should be required to get Congress' approval before acting.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 30, 2013

will now be expressing perhaps just a modicum -- just a shard, a soupcon, a whisper -- of cautious optimism now that President Obama has announced that he will take his case to Congress.

Unless, of course, he just can't:



UPDATE:

Nope.

He just can't.

Mr. Greenwald from The Guardian:

It's a potent sign of how low the American political bar is set that gratitude is expressed because a US president says he will ask Congress to vote before he starts bombing another country that is not attacking or threatening the US. 

...

Relatedly, it's hard to imagine a more potent sign of a weak, declining empire than having one's national "credibility" depend upon periodically bombing other countries.

Other standout performances?

Peggy Noonan telling us that pretty much every one of the voices in her head agrees that the President taking his case for dropping bombs on Syria to Congress was weakling awfulness:

Pretty much everybody views it as 'The president blinked.'

Also a special award goes out to whoever it was that convinced Mary Matalin to go for that freezer-bag-of-silly-putty-crowned-with-a-snapped-off-mop-head look:

Bravo, sir!  Bra-vo!

And proving once again that the Beltway can't stop leaning on it's 2003 Palm Pilot Chickenhwawk Contact list and that Fox News is the real last refuge of scoundrels, ladies and gentlemen, Holy Joe Lieberman (h/t Heather!):

Meanwhile, as far down the spectrum as one can get from Holy Joe, the "Tavis Smiley" half of the "Smiley and West's Deeply, Deeply Disappointed in Barack Obama Road Show" hangs a Deeply Disappointed expression on his face and explains how Vietnam is Syria, how violence is never the answer, and how Deeply Disappointed he is that President Barack Obama is not President Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Just days ago we were celebrating 50 years since the March on Washington and President Obama stood where Dr. King stood 50 years ago. And we honored Martin with our words in Washington and now here we are days away from dishonoring him with our deeds in Syria.

... 

There’s the issue of violence. War, Dr. King would say were he here, is not the answer. We cannot worship at the altar of retaliation. It’s either non-violent co-existence or violent co-annihilation, Dr. King would say were he here...This is connected to Iraq, it’s connected to all of our history and we can’t honor him with our words and then dishonor him days later.

Rotting somewhere at the bottom of the sea, the remains of Osama bin Laden could not be reached for comment as to whether or not violence is never the answer.