Sunday Morning Comin' Down

As "Meet the Press" continues to devolve into the test-pattern that great-aunt Muriel falls asleep to while everyone under 90 busies themselves with other things, it is once again worth mentioning why the marginal utility of debating Conservatives is zero.

Because Conservatives do not understand what "Conservatism" means anymore, and because Conservatives do not understand what "debate" means anymore.  Because so much of their ideology has failed so quickly, so completely and so spectacularly, "Conservatives" these days are nothing more drunken chameleons staggering  across a Jackson Pollock --  radically changing their colors over and over again depending on which wingnut fairy tale went up in flames this week and which formerly "true conservative" hero has now been declared an unperson.

Also, having been sealed inside the wingut bell jar re-breathing Rush Limbaugh's beer farts for so long, they haven't the first fucking clue what an actual "Liberal" looks or sounds like anymore.  For example, here Conservative spokesweasel Avik Roy -- one the of Heartland Institute Conservatives which Mr. Chris Hayes inexplicable keeps putting on my Liberal teevee -- reflexively serving up the standard "Both Sides" alibi when confronted with the brute reality of his tribe's War on the Poor (emphasis added):

Avik Roy: There is a tension between the Libertarian Right for whom all welfare programs are immoral, and the Center-Right which says let's have an efficient safety-net -- let's deliver those benefits efficiently -- and there is a Progressive Side which says all welfare programs are good regardless of whether they're inefficient or not.

Chris Hayes: No one makes that argument!

Avik Roy: Plenty of people make that argument.

(At which point Mr. Hayes did not toss Mr. Roy off of my Liberal teevee.  He didn't even put a finger in Mr. Roy's chest and say "Name one!" as any real man of Chicago would do. Instead he let another Heartland Institute lie slide which I am sure will be the subject of a much longer "What The Hell Kind of Dirt Does The Heartland Institute Have on Chris Hayes?" discussion at some later date.)

Debate is impossible because American Conservatism is a cult. Period. Full stop. Its main trait is now nothing more than broad-spectrum reality denial and its main weapon in the fight to keep reality at bay is THE DECIBEL.

Decibels, and compliant Beltway accomplices willing to drive their getaway car:

Let us begin on Disco Dave's Disco Dance Party, where, after some preliminary throat-clearing from the Dancin' Master, and from my man Chuck Todd, someone named Kim Strassel got down to it.

STRASSEL: When you come out and you are that definitive, if anything does surface going forward that suggests that he does know, I mean that's the game-changer in this. Look, I think to what Chuck said, this is not-- I mean this has to be put in perspective, right? Okay, this is not Watergate. This is not even the I.R.S. targeting of last year. In fact-- it's not even, if you think about this as a raw display of political power, it's not even this White House using the sequester and the shutdown to inconvenience millions of Americans, as they did, too, to make a political point.

Now, it is at this point that a kind, intelligent host would point out, gently, to Strassel that she has left the surly bonds of mother Earth and drifted into the far reaches of the wingnutosphere. (The president was responsible for the shutdown?) And that, while she might find that a pleasant spot for peaceful rumination, it isn't fair to drag everyone watching this program on their electric teevees along with her. The Dancin' Master, however, having been presented with an entire goody-bag of arrant bullshit, responded by turning to the mayor of Baltimore, and asking,

GREGORY: But Mayor Blake, you've seen-- you're a politician. You are a mayor. You know as well as anybody that politics ain't beanbag.

The management would like to request at this time that these idiots stop misusing the sainted Mr. Dooley in such a promiscuous fashion...

This weekend, both the strength and weakness of a goosestepping mob all under the control of a single operator were on full display as everyone  from the top of the wingnut food chain --

...

“How could you not have known?,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani asked rhetorically. “How did President Obama not know about the IRS targeting right wing groups?”

Sean Spicer, the RNC’s communications director, spun Christie’s handling as “what America is yearning for.” “Yes, mistakes will happen,” Spicer said. “Do you own them? Do you take responsibility for them? Do you put in place — take action to ensure they don’t happen again. Too often, whether it’s Benghazi, GSA, the IRS scandal, we don’t say ‘me me me.’ We say it’s somebody else’s fault, blame somebody else, I had nothing to do with this. Chris Christie did. He said the buck stops with me.”

Perhaps the forthright summary of this position came in a tweet from Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL). “No Christie fan but ‘Bridgegate’ is small potatoes vs [Ambassador Stevens] + 3 others killed due to neglect/[mismanagement] -selective outrage #Benghazi.”

...

-- to the middle --

MSNBC takes over Meet The Press. The show is officially for the left. Only.
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) January 12, 2014

-- to the bottom --

‘Beyond parody!’ You won’t believe the ridiculous Christie coverage on ‘Meet the Press’

-- got the same fax from the Wingnut Central Cortex: begin freaking immediately out that anyone, anywhere is breaking into our mutual masturbation Moebius loop  of "Benghaaaaaaaaaazi!"-"IRS Scandal"-"gummit shutdown" dreck to cover Chris Christie.

Which brings us back to existential pointlessness of "debating" members of a cult who are, in the end, nothing but political Creationists: terrified lunatics walled up behind an ideology which demands 100% supplication, permits no new information in and declares all Reality to be its sworn enemy:

...

For those of you just tuning in, Bill Nye has (allegedly, no confirmation from Bill yet) agreed to debate noted creationist Ken Ham on Feb. 4th, the topic being “Is creation a viable model of human origins?”. (I can end this debate very quickly: “No.”)

To answer your question succinctly, no, I’m not excited. I don’t know why Bill agreed to do this. To make it even weirder, he’s doing it at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. That’s Ham’s home court. When you walk into a room where dinosaurs stand next to early humans, you have to understand that logic and reason might not walk in next to you.

Bill shouldn’t be worried about losing the debate on scientific grounds, but he might still lose, just by showing up. He really shouldn’t be having the debate in the first place. NASA scientists don’t agree to debate whether space exists or whether we actually went to the moon. Physicists don’t agree to debate whether gravity actually exists. Because there is no debate. Life arose on Earth from some previously inorganic, self-replicating system. Through the evolution and selection of systems so complex and time so vast that we are quite literally unable to fathom them, Earth’s living world ended up looking precisely like it does today, which is not necessarily the only way it could have ended up.