In another 5-4 decision, the court ruled that Hobby Lobby does not have to provide contraception to its employees.
Another 5-4 decision.
You know...it's almost like it matters who sits on the Supreme Court.
Which would seem to indicate that it matters who appoints Supreme Court justices.
Which would, in turn, appear to imply that elections have actual consequences for real people.
"It is now impossible to stop Bill Kristol from lying" Edition.
UPDATE: Brother Charles Pierce opines here that our Fourth Estate most dramatically embarrassed itself this Sunday by not pre-empting "Meet the Press" once again with, oh, let's say Exciting!Jai!Alai!Action and instead let just David Gregory go right on doing that thing he does where he holds his giant, simian features perfectly still and serious-like while equating the people who are trying to put a fire out with the people who are dancing giddily around that fire with Zippo lighters and Jerry cans of gasoline wearing "Arsonists Do It In Flagrante Delicto!" tee-shirts.
Ah, but the winner, and the first non-Cheney champion in our retooled Gobshite derby, is Himself, the Dancin' Master. He takes this week's House Cup for his interview with Bill Clinton in which he attempted to clear a height on the Both Sides Do It bar about which ordinary mortals can only dream.
GREGORY: And the real issue you talk about as well is some of this pain people are feeling in the middle class, the sense that the middle class, that the American dream is slipping away. I look at some of the numbers, 3.4 million Americans who have been out of work for six months plus. You have over 7 million who, by their own admission, are stuck in lower-paying jobs, part-time jobs. How can a Democratic candidate for president-- what challenges would a Democratic candidate for president face running on the Obama economy?
CLINTON: Well, first of all, that's not what anybody should do. You should run on making it better. But he didn't cause the meltdown. The actions that his administration took kept it from being worse. And there had been a concerted effort to stop implementing his economic plan in the second term so none of you have any idea whether they would have worked or not.
GREGORY: But you don't lay this at Speaker Boehner and the Republicans uniquely, do you? I mean, do you really think it's their opposition to the president that has forced him to have such impediments to get the economy growing again?
I do not challenge Brother Pierce's wisdom in this matter.
End UPDATE.
Our family has been road tripping it for the last several days (you haven't seen cool-under-pressure until you have seen Blue Gal carefully sound-editing the podcast in the back seat of a van fulla kids as we roar up Interstate 55.) It was a fine trip where many necessary things were accomplished that also happened to work out in the being-able-to-spend-time-with-family department much better that we could have ever planned.
So I was pleased and exhausted we piled into bed last night..
...only to awake to find genuine monster on my teevee spouting shit that would have gotten that awful, death's-head ricktus smirk slapped right off of the front his skull over in the Better Universe.
But over in this universe, there is no downside to being Bill Kristol. He's like a puppy who has been tossed a T-bone every time he shit the rug. And for no reason our titans of journalism cares to share with us rubes, as the shitpiles he leaves behind have gotten bigger -- as has his lying has gotten more and more blood-drunk and sociopathic -- the T-bone have also gotten bigger, which is why he was on my teevee Sunday morning explaining how George Bush's victory in Iraq was undone by the feckless and faithless Barack Obama (h/t David at Crooks and Liars)
Bill Kristol will never stop lying and never stop demanding that more American blood and treasure be sacrificed to his personal Neocon Moloch.
And why should he?
You see, when David at C/L headlines his post "Vanden Heuvel Shuts Down 'Architect Of Catastrophe' Bill Kristol..." he misses the real story, because no one is going to "shut down" Bill Kristol. Remember that this was the clown who, when "Time" magazine finally bounced from his featherbedding gig there
the New York Times promptly handed him one the most coveted spots in American journalism...right next fellow Neocon and Kristol's former employee at The Weekly Standard, David Brooks.
Pause for a moment to consider how many thousands of brilliant, deserving opinion writers and astute analysts would kill for a chance for a few column inches in either Time or the NYT. And yet every single one one of them was bypassed to make room for Bill Fucking Kristol.
And then let it sink in that neither publication made Kristol give up his day-job cranking out Neocon propaganda in order to lazily dash off an occasional, crappy column for their outfits. They just signed him up, on his terms.
And when Roger Ailes finally got tired of him (and -- quick show of hands -- how many of you know that Kristol's Neocon rag, The Weekly Standard, was financed into existence by Rupert Murdoch?) ABC held out the chair for him. Hired him with real, American money to be a bona fide ABC employee.
And so, no, Katrina Vanden Heuvel did not shut him down. Because next week she'll be long gone, off lecturing someone else about something else. And a week or two after that another media-approved Liberal or Centrist will be trotted on to bark at Kristol, or to coo and snuggle with him, but it really doesn't matter which, because after 15 minutes they'll be gone too. However, like roaches after a nuclear war, Bill Kristol will abide. He will go right on smirking and shrugging off atrocities that would shame any normal human into stepping in front of a bus. He will go right on routinely appearing each week on ABC's nationally syndicated network public interest broadcast where he is clearly at liberty to lie and lie and lie and lie.
And so, once again we must calmly skip over all the perfectly understandable wish-fulfillment fantasies about exiting Kristol from the planet, because no one is going to shoot Kristol into the sun. No one is going to drop him into Iraq, naked, with a target tattooed on his ass. No one is going to pile up his treasons and sins and lies high enough to blot out the sun, and then defenestrate him from the top of it.
None of that is ever going to happen.
But you know what could happen? Tomorrow?
Bill Kristol could awake to find himself not only unemployed but unemployable. He could come into work to find his cubby at ABC cleaned out and a security guard waiting to escort him from the building. He could open his email to discover that media community has put such a stink on him that not even the producers of "The Jenny McCarthy Show" or the bookers at "Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld" will touch him with a barge pole.
If our media simply aped the most basic "fire that staggeringly incompetent asshole who is always horribly wrong about everything" business model that most successful companies follow, all of this could happen.
But it won't. Because, according to Young Jonathan Greenberger -- the toddler ABC hired as the executive producer of their nationally syndicated network public interest broadcast -- Kristol is a "brilliant, original thinker":
So excited to have @ananavarro & Bill Kristol join our outstanding @ABC political team. Both brilliant, original thinkers #ThisWeek
— Jonathan Greenberger (@greenbergerj) February 2, 2014
ABC Dumps Bill Kristol As It Deals With Sagging `This Week'
By Howard Kurtz
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - ABC executives, worried about sinking ratings as Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts fall behind Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" on NBC, are starting to overhaul the once-mighty "This Week."
The first victim is Bill Kristol, a conservative presence for three years on the shoot-the-breeze Sunday round table. The Weekly Standard editor taped his last show Wednesday after being told that his contract would not be renewed.
The axing of Kristol comes three months after the departure of the show's executive producer, Dorrance Smith, who, like Kristol, worked in the Bush White House. Several sources confirmed that contrary to the public announcement at the time, Smith was forced out by ABC News President David Westin, who has had an increasingly strong hand in the program.
Smith said Kristol "added a much-needed different perspective from a conservative viewpoint, which I don't think they have any interest in trying to fill. They're tone-deaf when it comes to political evenhandedness. . . . Rather than being journalistically honest, they're much more comfortable with people who share viewpoints closer to their own," he said of ABC management.
...
Smith, a friend of Linda Tripp from their days in the Bush White House, has told friends that he believes ABC management was displeased with some of the reporting he helped provide during the Monica Lewinsky scandal...
The story behind the reason why obviously malignant lunatics like Bill Kristol...and Dick Cheney...and Paul Wolfowitz...and so on...keep getting re-gifted back to the public over and over again must be awesome in its sheer, lurid grotesquerie: I can easily imagine a witchbag of corruption, extortion, fanaticism and greed, with top notes of incest and a smooth, cynical finish that lies somewhere between Senator Pat Geary's relationship with the Corleone Family
and Jaime Lannister's relationship with his sister.
But of course, all of this everyday prostitution of the public airwaves, all of the moral squalor in which our Fourth Estate unrepentantly wallows, is being done either at the behest of, or with the approval of, or under the noses of the same people who are in charge of making the little pictures come out of the teevee machine.
So don't expect any help from those precincts anytime soon.
Because when it comes to holding the media accountable, remember...
...first they ignore you
...then the laugh at you
...then they go back to ignoring you because, ha! ha!, we control the little pictures coming out of the teevee machine, so fuck you, hippie!
In the meantime you can amuse yourself by counting how many times Republican Hack ad ABC Employee Matthew Dowd uses the phase "both sides" or some variation thereof in a single 8-minute interval.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Pretty clear from being with the President for a couple of days this week, everything we've seen in the last few weeks, he's given up on Congress completely. Going to go on offense with the American people and going to continue with these Executive actions.
DOWD: Well I think both sides have given up on each other...
And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we are off to the races!
You can just feel watching the interview and then watching Republicans' reaction to many different things, this incredible frustration that neither side can get anything done right now.
They both think things need to get done. They're frustrated that neither side willing to give on the other side.
...they're both angry about it.
Both sides are -- I think have been reduced to stunts.
Of course, no cavalcade of Conservative propaganda would be complete without a red, white and blue celebration of Teh Tea Party!
STEPHANOPOULOS: So Bill Kristol, this win by Thad Cochran I think surprised a lot of people. Did it surprise you?
KRISTOL: A little bit. They're (inaudible) a very good technical drive of turning out some additional voters. But I think it's a Pyrrhic victory. I mean, the momentum in the Republican Party is not with Thad Cochran. It's with the Tea Party. The Tea Party is the one group in America...
Which we are still being assured at this late date is NOT just the same, old, raving, bigoted Republican base who have finally kicked the Party's cellar door off it hinges and are letting their freak flag fly, but is instead a brand new group of patriotic Murricans, unsullied by the taint of 1) Being completely fucking wrong about everything for +30 years, and 2) Being lying, pants-burning-like-a-tire-fire hypocrites who ferociously oppose things under the Kenyan Usurper which they either never gave a shit about or ferociously supported under the Bush Regime.
KRISTOL: Yes, but they have nominated a lot of nominees who are accepted, in many state, who are acceptable to both the Tea Party and the establishment, are running much more populist campaigns.
I do think the Tea Party infusion into the Republican Party gives the Republicans a chance to be the party of the working class and the middle class.
To get back to our earlier discussion, I very -- Marco Rubio, who gave speeches last week on reform and conservatism; Ted Cruz; Scott Walker; Mike -- all those people can run against Hillary Clinton as spokesmen for working and middle class Americans.
And that is a huge tribute to the Tea Party that they have changed --
DOWD: They're changing the Republican Party. They're changing the Republican Party.
No, you douchebag, they are the Republican Party. They are the Republican Party.
And they always have been the Republican Party, because (sing it with me now) There. Is No Tea. Party.
Finally, in a brief, driftglass aside, let me say how simultaneously encouraging and incredibly frustrating it is that the charming and delightful Melissa Harris-Perry --
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY 06/28/14
Is the tea party now in the mainstream?
Is the tea party just a fancy name for the Republican Party? Melissa Harris-Perry explains how the rift between establishment Republicans and the tea party could just be an illusion.
The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.
Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.
If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".
And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?
Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.
Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
"I dub you Pinocchio's conscience, lord high keeper of the knowledge of right and wrong, counselor in moments of high temptation, and guide along the straight and narrow path. Arise, Sir Jiminy Cricket.”
-- The Blue Fairy
Links:
Da' money goes here:
* Sorry for the Very Loud Music in the earlier release of this podcast. We have corrected the problem and have swapped in the corrected version above
"For in those care-free days, I and my so-called droogies wore our maskies, which were like real horror-show disguises."
-- Alex, "A Clockwork Orange"
To begin, a bit of history that will not matter in the slightest to anyone outside of irrelevant fringe dorks like me, but which future students of American history might amusing.
Yesterday, tea party darlin' Chris McDann'l got his nuclear-bright future as the Very Most Reagany-Pure Senator from Jesusland slapped out of his Neoconfederate paws. Slapped to the ground and stomped on by a bunch of uppity black people armed with (horrors!) voter registration cards, which is why today Teh Internets were positively wormy with the lashing and the barking and the generally incoherent fury of our nation's most politically active inbred swamp folk.
The same inbred swamp folk (it is important to add) who have spent the last six years rage! rage! raging! against deficits and Evil Gummit overreach and the horrors of compromise.
Of course (here comes the history bit) a scant ten years ago, the very same inbred swamp folk who now rage!, rage! against deficits and Evil Gummit overreach and the horrors of compromise...
...went to the polls in record numbers to re-elect the lyingest, most criminal, mostcriminally incompetent, torturingest, most treasonous, most deficit-spawning, Evil Gummit overreaching and "How dare you not support the Commander-in-Chief you traitor!" touting Administration in American history.
And after they did it, they turned around and -- along with the rest of the 60 million Americans who put the Dubya Regime back in power -- told the rest of us to SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK IT Hippies!
Bwahahahaha!
We Won. You Lost. Fuck You!
You know how I know this?
Because I was there.
So were you.
And we remember.
And so long as it is within our meager power, we will never let them forget which side they were on when it counted. Never, ever let them forget how wildly they cheered Dubya, or how unrestrained and deafening their contempt was for anyone who dared to stand athwart the serial catastrophes the Bush Administration were unleashing on America and shout "Stop!"
United States presidential election in Mississippi, 2004
There never has been -- a fact which Liberals like your's truly nailed while Tea Party fairy tale was still being beta tested (The "Independent" Granfalloon), and which even some outliers in Conservative Brain Caste are now quietly willing to admit.
The Tea Party Never Existed
MAY 21, 2014 4:34 PM EDT
By Ramesh Ponnuru
...
And so, because There. Is. No. Tea. Party.™ there obviously cannot be a schism between it and the Republican Party. There is merely a difference of opinion between those who deploy the selective, self-lobotomizing tool of Strategic Forgettery™ as a tactical matter, and those slabs of Orwellian slunkmeat who have so thoroughly internalized the habit of doublethinking away the incriminating past...and science...and math...and causality and, well, everything else about the world that is disquieting or inconvenient that they are no longer sane:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
As I and other Liberals have written since the dawn of blogging (and about which we railed at our crystal radio sets before it became possible to write down whatever we wished and publish it to the wider world with the clink of a button), this is nothing more or less that the Golem which the Party of Jefferson David built in order to win elections and raze those parts of The Evil Gummint which it's oligarch owners want to see destroyed. And there are a lot of words that are appropriate to describe the Conservative monster that has turned on its maker, but "schism" is not one of them.
Predictable? Sure.
Predicted? Definitely.
Dangerous? Absolutely.
Entertaining? Damn betcha.
And very, very dangerous? Absolutely.
Because are in middle of a long, ugly knife fight for the future of this country, and to win that future, we must reclaim our past.
To win elections, crush the New Deal and sell the United States into perpetual corporate serfdom, it was Ronald Reagan and the rest of the Conservative Elites who spent years and years and literally billions of dollars to create the infinitely reprogrammable army of imbeciles from which many of those same Conservative Elites now flee in horror.
And however hard they try, it remains our solemn duty to never let them forget it.
PS. Proper "Thanks Yous" to everyone who has hit the tip jar will be forthcoming once things get a little less nutty here at Castle Driftglass
Rush Limbaugh: "Black Uncle Tom Voters" Are Responsible For Sen. Cochran's Primary Win. On the June 25 edition of his radio show, Rush Limbaugh wondered whether Cochran's winning campaign slogan was "Uncle Toms For Thad," expressing outrage that African-American voters contributed to Cochran's primary success.
Tea Party urges Chris McDaniel to run as write-in after black Democrats ‘steal’ primary
By Travis Gettys
Wednesday, June 25, 2014 12:38 EDT
Members of Tea Party express blamed McDaniel’s loss on “nefarious campaign tactics” and vowed to split from the Republican Party.
“If Cochran wins this #mssen race, the GOP is done,” said Amy Kremer, of Tea Party Express. “They teamed up with Dems to steal a race. Kiss the base goodbye.”
McDaniel refused to concede the race, arguing that he wanted to ensure the “sanctity” of the vote was upheld and the GOP race had been decided by Republican voters.
“Every Democrat who voted for Cochran yesterday while intending to vote for Childers in November broke the law. That’s fraud,” said Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association. “If Democrats broke the law when they voted for Cochran, that’s voter fraud and this is in fact a stolen election.”
Sarah Palin suggested last week on Facebook that Democratic activists had offered “scooby snacks” to black voters to encourage them to support Cochran, and she urged McDaniel to challenge the runoff results.
“There were several potentially illegal political games afoot in Mississippi to motivate Democrat voters to ‘switch’ over to the GOP for a day to help save a 42-year Republican member of Congress,” Palin said.
“On top of that, millions of dollars from out of state liberal billionaires like Mike Bloomberg poured in at the last minute on that same incumbent’s behalf,” added Palin, a former half-term governor of Alaska and failed vice presidential candidate who now lives in Arizona. “You have to ask yourself why?”...
Of course, anything that prompts another nationally broadcast bout of Palin-brand glossolalia from the Scintilla from Wasilla is worth it for the entertainment value alone.
Now wouldn't it be something if those damn Yankee, n*gger-lovin', outside agitators "out of state liberal billionaires" who are apparently suddenly possessed of the idea that it would be a wonderful thing to spend some of their beer money some democracy, would decide that helping to underwrite and sustain a genuine, 50-state liberals infrastructure would be a mighty fine thing?
Of course I'm not holding my breath, which is why I'm shaking this little tin cup...
Having watched America's most unctuous Fox News faux-patriot haircut "interview" America's most egregiously unindicted war criminal on the subjects of war and peace and newculers and terr'ists and such I sadly have nothing much to add to my February 2006 assay of the same egregiously unindicted war criminal being interviewed by a different-but-equally-unctuous Fox News faux-patriot haircut on the subjects of war and peace and newculers and terr'ists and such.
Because why bother changing the script when your audience are the same octogenarian bigots and lunatics and gun-fetishists and halfwits who gave up on forming any new political memories sometime in the mid-1990s?
Vice President interviewed by own penis.
Film at 11:00.
So great; enough goats were slaughtered and virgins ritually deflowered (then ritually re-flowered, ‘cause you can't have no sluts interning at Rancho Ragnarok) in a manner pleasing enough to coax Dread Lord Cheney from his Undisclosed Location for a little Undistressed Locution and to take-responsibility-but-not-actually-apologize-for shooting a peasant
Which is still technically illegal.
Chosen for this plum assignment was Evil Gumby himself, Brit Hume...a flatly affected human grimace who gave up any pretense of integrity and objectivity around the time Nikita Khrushchev was ousted and now just plies a trade that that consists exclusively of suckling Republican jizz like a blue whale straining krill – and for the same reason.
A man who must to stand on his ippy-tippy toes to reach the yummy dollop of stinkfoot hanging like a summer peach from Dick Cheney’s cybernetic arch-supports.
So what?
I mean, if you want to see a very clear, simple demonstration of ballistic evidence that just demolishes one of the many stupid lies Cheney has been putting out, go the this site and have a look, because baby, Physics Don’t Dance.
So what was the Hume Puppet Show but another fractal of the same nation-gobbling Son of the Blob that Wingnuttlyvania steadfastly refuses to even acknowledge is eating the country alive even as it swallows whole diners and pick-ups right in front of them? A biopsy of the larger disease that accidentally found itself under the dusty microscope that the press should have been using every fucking day for the last five years.
But…
But, there is an initial instant when the GOP squeezes out yet another lie smack in front of the whole world that’s worth watching. That magical moment at the very beginning of the Republican Lie Cycle; when some High Ranking Bush flunky shambles onto the national dance floor, squats right down, and gives birth to another monster while the everyone watches.
And for a looong moment, the music stops, and a hush falls over the Party of Lincoln…because they quite simply do not know what to do.
So for those of us with functional cerebral cortices that watched Cheney being interviewed by his own penis and wondered what possible purpose was being served – who was being swayed or fooled by this ridiculous fraud, the answer is...we’re asking the wrong question.
The rank and file of the Modern GOP – people that have blindly stuck by the Bush Junta despite a daily avalanche of proof of their treachery and criminality that is simply breathtaking to behold – these are not people for whom facts and figures and causality and honor have any meaning.
These are not people of reason, but of ritual.
Sorta Obsessive Compulsive Christalopithecene, who don’t notice or care about the actual lies and treasons of their Dear Leader, but only freak out when the proper rituals are not followed to counter-hex those lies. It is very Old Testament and very schizophrenic, this idea that if you just follow the proper sacraments perfectly, and make the proper sacrifices just so, the High Priests of your Party and Faith will keep the raging Death God you've created out of your own nightmares at bay.
So, for example, part of that ritual is to “Bring out the Gimp”.
When polls show that 98% of African Americans loathe the GOP to the point they wouldn't scrape a Republican off their shoe and feed it to an alley rat…they trot out one of their “Fo’ Rent Two-Percent” hirelings like Ron Christie to spout Party Dogma as if that proves something.
When the GOP claws its way to power by gay-bashing but they have to pretend they didn’t…they trot out Andy Sullivan to show that their Klan is an Inclusive Klan.
When they need to lay on a light coating of “bi-partisan” shellac over the latest pile of dogshit they’re flogging as Kobe Beef Tenderloin Medallions…they trot out Kapo Joe Lieberman who will cheerfully sell out his own Party, anywhere, any time.
Which to an averagely bright eight-year-old would prove nothing except how desperate you are to cover the stink of the massive corpse in the middle of the room, and how pathetically you go about trying to do it with a doily and a schpritz of Lie-Sol.
But none of this has ever been about proof; it is entirely about ritual.
These are solemn rites performed for the Party Golem -- the Men of Mud with no thoughts but the thoughts they are told to think by the Dear Leader, hard-wired with the Prime Directive that Liberals are Always Wrong, Liberals are to Blame for Everything, and that the Dear Leader is a Plainspoken Man and a Per’fessed Christian and therefore is simply incapable of telling anything other than the Unvarnished Truth.
They are brought to a semblance of life by the stamp of hate and fear and greed that the Roves and Dobsons affix to their steeply-sloped foreheads. They are animated by Majyk Conjure Bile words by the likes of Coulter and Limbaugh; the demigods who casually burn yesterday's Scripted Verities, carefully inscribe on Hate Radio Parchment what their thralls are supposed to think today, and slip the new talking points into their mouths.
Their eyes flutter – the Party Golem – and they roar out into the streets to obediently scream today’s lies, which may or may not completely contradict what they were screaming the day before.
These people are not recruited for their critical thinking skills; they are useful only for their stupidity and meek submission to Conservative Authority. For the manipulable hellfest of bad religion and ugly ideology that packs their Creationist Bell Jar skulls. For the leering, jeering delight at that particular bloodthrill pleasure knucklewalkers get when they can pound the shit out of people who are better, smarter and more honorable than they will ever be.
But here's the catch: The rites must be observed.
And if the proper Kabuki is not performed with all deliberate speed, the rank-and-file will start rubbing their little, dry hind legs together and making little frightened chirping noises. Not out of any concern for the “truth” -- they don't "do" truth -- but out of a growing fear of being stranded out in the big, scary Liberal World with no one to tell them what slogans they’re supposed to shout.
So when the Vice President shoots a man in the face, and the story stinks on ice seven different ways, another meaningless bit of theater must be enacted: the “Candid TeeVee Conversation”.
The liar summons the fake press to “tell his story” with just enough truthiness to shut the drones up. A well-compensated peon asking his liege lord softball questions with no substantial follow-up of any kind on any matter.
Me, I have always found that lag time between Republican Lies and the reprogramming of the Republican Golem to be a useful barometer of just how much trouble the Administration is actually in at that moment, because you can always tell when something has gone horribly wrong with the slow and dirty job of reformatting the opinions of the Party Meat.
Since they are unwilling or incapable of thinking for themselves -- many believing free and independent thought to be, in fact, a Snare set by the Devil -- when a glitch pops up, they return to their default setting of running in tight, panicked verbal circles, mindlessly screaming Liberals are LiarsLiarsLiars until they are told what to think and say and feel and blame by an Authorized Party Technician.
Which, in this case meant that Deadeye Dick had to sit still and at least pretend he was fielding real questions from a real reporter long enough to satisfy the minimum needs of the ritual. So that tomorrow or next week when Scotty Dog is “peppered” with questions from thirty yards away, he can say, “The Vice President already covered that” a million times.
And it must be terribly frustrating for not-so-Heart-Healthy Dick not to be able to bust out and just say what is so clearly gnawing and stinking away at the inside of his skull like a rabid skunk.
That, “What I say and what I do is none of anyone’s fucking business. Not the Democrats, not the gibbering monkeymass ‘public’, not the tinned-eel sycophant ‘press’ and certainly not the Dimwit Dauphin.
"Look, I’m trying to get shit done here.
Shit you people are all too fucking stupid to comprehend, but lemme tell you, dismantling the entire United States government and replacing it with a Chief Executive Emperor right in front of your eyes is not a job for a pussy, so quit jiggling my elbow with your stupid questions and your mock surprise and STFU!"
But he must instead bite his tounge and fake contrition.
Because in the end, even the Dread Lord Cheney must bend a bloated knee to a slightly higher power: the empty rituals that keep the Obsessive Compulsive Christopaths from twitching out of control.
McDaniel Won't Concede: We Must Ensure 'Republicans' Voted
DANIEL STRAUSS – JUNE 25, 2014, 12:09 AM EDT
Tea party favorite and Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) did not concede defeat to Sen. Thad Corchan (R-MS) after the runoff election was called for Cochran in the race for U.S. Senate in Mississippi.
Instead, McDaniel, in his election night speech to supporters on Tuesday, suggested that he would fight the election results. McDaniel said "there is something a bit strange, there is something a bit unusual about a Republican primary that's decided by liberal Democrats.
"So you're exactly right. Everybody looks back. Democrats love talking about 2003 to 2007 and how bone-headed Republicans were. You've got Neocons who love to talk about 2007 and the Surge and 2011 and all the mistakes the Democrats made.
But the question is, what do we do moving forward."
You are not going to make any noises about bringing to book any of the bloodthirsty ghouls who lied this country into war.
When anyone asks anything tricksy about the past, aggressively deploy Conservative Deflector Strategy Number One -- Both Sides! Both Sides! Both Sides! -- and then immediately shift the subject from Yesterday to Tomorrow.
As I have already written ad nauseum, the "Both Sides" lie is the biggest Big Lie in American politics. There isn't even a close second. It is the fool-proof escape route for every Conservative douchbag from Dick Cheney to Joe Scarborough to Andrew Sullivan to your Crazy Uncle Liberty. It is the lifeboat every one of them uses to duck accountability every time another one of their toxic fair tales goes up in smoke.
And until their "Both Sides Do It" escape pod is blown out of the sky once and for all, this is the way things will continue to be.
Dear Shabby, My Colleague Keeps Sublimating His Divorce Into Everything He Writes!
Dear Shabby,
A colleague of mine is a Very Famous Column Writer for an important newspaper in New York City. Twice a week he delivers what his millions of readers take to be either sage insights into the human condition or canny insider information about the political scene, with some stuff about economics or what's going on overseas mixed in to keep it fresh.
His problem? He really doesn't know anything useful about politics. Or economics. Or what's going on overseas. And so his "insights" usually start off being to nothing more than the reconstituted, water-cooler gossip of people who already think just like he does, and end up being horribly, horribly wrong.
Several years ago, after my colleague had made a regular featurette out of telling his readers how great everything was going in Iraq, he began to have less and less to say on the subject. As Iraq collapsed he got razzed a lot for what he had written, but he deals with all criticism the same way: he ignores it. Gradually he just stopped writing about Iraq and how terrific everything was there altogether: he never retracted any of his nutty "insights", but instead dealt with Iraq as if it had been sent to a puppy farm upstate where we couldn't see it anymore, but where it was probably playing happily with other countries.
To fill the hole in his lineup, my colleague started cranking out what I can only describe as "advice columns for carbon based life forms as written by a robot from Arcturus." As I said, he refused to walk back any of the truly awful things he had written, or even acknowledge the existence of the people who had been right all along, but suddenly his columns got very scoldy. Everyone everywhere should be a lot more humble because everybody was always equally right and wrong about everything all the time. Humans should be more reticent! Also less judgmental!
Also he took a really weird turn into telling humans who are poor that they should not be having so much sexytime. Because apparently the problems of the poor have nothing to do with the structural problems of a job market geared to wrecking the middle class and relentlessly slashing wages, benefits and pensions. Or from the a handful of plutocrats blowing up the world economy. Or from seeing the price of housing, education, basic medical care and everything else skyrocket out of their reach. Or from the policies driven by a merciless war being waged on the poor because Conservatives equate poverty with moral depravity.
Instead, my colleague went on and on about how the poors are screwed up because of all the wrong sexytime they are having. And their broken families. And their disordered communities. And so forth. My colleague, I should add, lives in a large mansion in a very exclusive neighborhood. He has vast spaces for entertaining. His job pay him insane amounts of money to dispense "insights" that the years have shown to be pretty terrible. His job has gotten him many other jobs that pay him a lot more money to basically read aloud whatever he wrote last week. His job lets him travel the world as he wishes, gives him unlimited access to the most powerful people on Earth, and lets him take extended vacations or "book leave" whenever he pleases. And from this perspective, his advice only the poors is basically that their lives will get better when they start emulating the behavior of high net-worth strivers with their stable families in their well-ordered communities that my colleague interacts with every day.
Then -- very quietly -- my wealthy, well-ordered colleague got divorced.
Like his famous "Now that the war is over" columns about Iraq, this subject is never mentioned (although recently it is rumored that his marriage advice to the Great Unwashed has been seen at an upstate puppy farm where it gambols happily in the sun with Tikrik and Mosul and Baghdad all day long.) Instead, my colleague has quickly and quietly shifted his focus from telling his readers that the poors need to get their shit together, to telling his readers that life is hard and relationships are messy:
...
Most advice, whether on love or business or politics, is based on the premise that we can just will ourselves into being rational and good and that the correct path to happiness is a straight line. These writers, in the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” school, are essentially telling you to turn yourself into a superstar by discipline and then everything will be swell.
But Netzer’s piece is nicely based on the premise that we are crooked timber. We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”
People with a crooked timber mentality tend to see life as full of ironies. Intellectual life is ironic because really smart people often do the dumbest things precisely because they are carried away by their own brilliance. Politics is ironic because powerful people make themselves vulnerable because they think they can achieve more than they can. Marriage is ironic because you are trying to build a pure relationship out of people who are ramshackle and messy...
So my question, Shabby, is how do I get my colleague to once and for all Shut The Fuck Up about that which he clearly knows not? Or, alternatively, where can I get a job that pays a king's ransom for pulling arrant, nonsense out of my ass twice a week?
CYBERSPACE — Move over bitcoin, "titcoin" wants to be adult’s very own cryptocurrency.
Although a number of industry companies have already adopted bitcoin as a means to pay for online porn, titcoin claims to be the first digital currency aimed squarely at the porn industry.
The brainchild of finance types Edward Mansfield, Richard Allen, and a third anonymous founder, the payment method recently created a buzz on a bogus YouTube introduction video.
But in a Vice interview, the creators said titcoin is for real, works like the myriad other methods, and is ideal for secret porn purchases.
A host of cryptocurrencies have come and gone since bitcoin’s boom in popularity, but none have been aimed at a specific industry like titcoin — especially for adult products.
“In the future, you might have a bitcoin account with your spouse. You may not want them to see you purchasing products or subscriptions on adult sites, so having an industry-specific coin has certain advantages for consumers,” Mansfield told Vice.
Syria is still in the middle of some awful carnage, and still central to the developing chaos in the region. Its ruler is still a tyrant. But I can still recall the loud cries for the president to make the big boom-boom on these weapons, regardless of what might happen when you blow up a chemical weapons depot.
Senator John McCain, on the other hand, favors military action, arguing that United States should intervene even if the reports of chemical weapon use aren't true because Bashar al-Assad will likely use them in the future...If the United States were to intervene in Syria, it could not rely on air power to destroy Syrian chemical weapons facilities. Airstrikes would risk releasing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and exposing bystanders.
The number of bullets we all dodged in 2008 continues to rise.
Except, as happens sometimes when trying to talk about The Past without waking the Purity Duck, about half of the history of these events has been left out of this equation.
Sure, bomb-first-ask-questions-never types like John McCain completely flipped out because they always flip out when we're not blowing the shit out of something somewhere. That is undeniably true.
But it is also undeniably true that people like David Sirota were eyeballing exactly the same events and stating categorically that Obama was obviously a bloodthirsty narcissist, Hell-bent on invading another country at any cost:
Yet, despite all that, and despite the government’s recent history of lying about WMDs, the pro-war crowd nonetheless simply assumes that what the Obama administration is alleging is unquestionably true. Making such an assumption is, in part, another expression of narcissism.
Simply put, conceited narcissists don’t seem to care whether the entire case for the war they are advocating is actually rooted in verifiable fact, because their focus is on their own feelings. More specifically, they care only about their desire to feel heroic, righteous and moral, whether or not the entire narrative that makes them feel that was is actually true. Additionally, they know they don’t have to fear any consequences of ignoring evidentiary questions and focusing on their own desire to feel heroic. After all, even if the case for war ends up being a fraud, it won’t personally affect them because their beloved cruise missiles won’t be blowing up them or their families.
No doubt, the government’s motives for a war with Syria have little to do with moral opposition to chemical weapons. The geopolitics of Syria affect everything from oil to Iran to Israel to the defense budget – and those concerns might be what’s really driving the push to war. But the public sales pitch for war cannot dare admit that because such a truth is taboo.
I realize that salting the tail of the Purity Duck is usually nothing but trouble, yielding little but a doubling and redoubling of loathing from the True Believers and a series of digital slammed-screen-doors and promises to never darken my drooling, jackbooted blog ever again, both in the comment section and via email. But honestly, if McCain deserves a trip to the woodshed from Esquire Magazine and others -- and he does! -- then Sirota deserves at least one slap on the wrist from at least one, lowly flyover blogger.
I also realized that bringing this up in the middle of a fundraiser is probably a poor business decision, but honestly if I were running this blog as some carefully barbered profit center according to some larger strategic plan wherein I wrote only risked pissing off people who were already on the other side of the ideological planet from me, it would be a very different place.
But it's just me and as I told you during my very first fundraiser...
A Fundraiser Six Years In The Making...
...
I have watched the tides go in and out on blogging. Watched the organic material of the Great Primordial Blogging Sea organize itself into ever larger, more complex organisms, with ever more complex metabolisms and business plans, which -- when you pop the hood -- still depend heavily or entirely on "aggregating" something called "content".
In much the same way a blue whale "aggregates" krill :-)
And [another characteristic of neocons is] never ever taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions. They are the post-modern nihilists they accuse the left of being. Only much more shameless. But it’s worth repeating that they only appear on cable news because the brain-dead producers and editors decide they will. The blame for treating these congenital fantasists, hysterics and war-mongers as experts lies in part with the sheer laziness and cynicism of cable news bookers.
Except that is not strictly true.
For example, "This Week..." is not a cable news show, and neither is "Meet the Press". They are among the dung-spattered crowned jewels of two of America's most powerful, network news organizations, and yet both of them have repeatedly invited the absolute dregs of the Neoconservative cult onto the public airwaves and them let them get away with murder. Hell, "This Week..." doesn't just let Neocon goof run nekkid through the studio: they went out of their way to put one of the ringleaders of the cabal on the fucking payroll a full-time employee.
The decision by ABC to hire Bill Kristol did not leap fully-formed from the lazy mind of a booker, and whether the Neocon goof in questions appears on basic cable chamber-pot filler like "Guess That Soup!" with Shuck Todd or served by a network news corporation's on the fine china like "Meet the Press", the frequency and aggressiveness with which members of this tiny cult of liars and war pimps is shoved in our faces -- and then allowed to shart their insane twaddle virtually unchecked -- far exceeds the limits of any theory that ascribes this activity to laziness and stupidity.
However, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe it's all on autopilot.
Maybe everyone in teevee news' executive suites is dead, and in their last moments they programmed a clutch of little robots to make booking and hiring decisions for every teevee network in America by just clicking through the same 2002 Rolodex over and over and over again. But right or wrong, there is an easy way to test this theory because this is a question which is ultimately answerable.
All someone has to do is walk down the hall or drop by a cubicle or pick up the fucking phone and asking them!
Not me, sadly. No one returns the calls of trivial Liberals from flyover country. No one of any importance (and no one who interns for anyone of importance) answers our emails, responds to our tweets or pokes or pings. No one reacts to our posts. And when it comes to just getting our ideas in front of their audiences -- ideas that, time after time, have been revealed by brutal reality to have been absolutely correct -- remember that one of the final instructions to the Lonely Booking Robots from their human creators was obviously:
PROCEDURE DIVISION
Select-Guest
Read Next Record.
IF Condition = 'CONSERVATIVE', Then GOTO Book-Guest
IF Condition = 'LIBERAL', Then GOTO Select-Guest
IF Condition = "End of File" Then GOTO Book-John-McCain
...
However, my fellow 2008 Weblog Award Winner, Mr. Andrew Sullivan has been on most of these shows. Repeatedly. He is a denizen of D.C. He gets invited to state dinners. He has publishers who will publish and promote his books whenever he chooses. He has bookers. He has Arianna Huffington on speed-dial. he has Bill Maher on speed-dial. He has Tina Brown on super-speed dial. He knows people on the inside of the media business who will take his call, and he has a media platform big enough to disseminate their answers widely, even if that answer is "No Comment".
Pinpointing the individuals who keep putting Neocon liars and lunatics and war criminals on television and sharing the names and phone numbers and thought-processes of those decision makers with the rest of us rubes is clearly something that makes even the most Liberal members of the Mainstream Media deeply uncomfortable.
Ergo it is also a subject which this trivial Liberal from flyover country will continue to find intensely interesting.
