Sunday Morning Comin' Down

Busy as this last week has been, I have not had the time to flop down in front of the Glass Teat and take the full and glorious measure of how the insular denizens of the swampy berg of Washington D.C. are smugly autofellating themselves during this Summer Break weekend.

But this one thing caught my eye...

On thing which is is so gloriously representative of the denialist "Both Sides" flapdoodle that has become the lingua franca of our political media that it is the beyond my poor power to parody simply because it comes out of the box already so full-on self-parodying that all you have to do is push the button and watch (after the ad):

One day your grandkids will have to stand in line at a holomuseum to hear authentic, frontier Centrist gibberish, like that my friends,

so enjoy it in its natural state while you can.

Of course, this is all the result of the gutlessness of those "Moderate Republicans, Undecideds, and Libertarians" about whom I wrote this little parable way back on the Year of Our Lord Aught Five, when I thought one day it might become necessary to explain the monstrous rise and toxic collapse of the Modern Republican Cult to very small children.

We will never be rid of Centrist con men because the underlying causes of them will continue multiplying like cholera bacteria until the GOP as we know it is banished to the Phantom Zone.  And that will never happen until Moderate Republican Steve is forced to admit that not only has Crazy Uncle Liberty been out of his fucking mind for years, but that Liberal Cousin Jennifer has been right about Crazy Uncle Liberty being out of his fucking mind all along.

And Moderate Republican Steve is nowhere near emotionally or intellectually strong enough to face the fact that he has been horribly wrong since forever.  And from the little acorn of his cowardice and intractable unwillingness to take any responsibility for the hellbeast he helped create, the mighty oak of reflexive Both Siderism.  Individually, Moderate Republican Steve may appear weak and stupid, but multiply him by millions and you create a massive marketplace for an entire weasel-word vocabulary of denialism, and (like opportunistic diseases picnicking on a ruined immune system) a farrago of vanity-funded Centrist pyramid schemes each trying to cash in on Steve's frantic desire to continue to pretend that what this country really needs is to get rid of  Crazy Uncle Liberty and Liberal Cousin Jennifer because of the horrible, horrible "extremes on both sides".

Vanity-funded Centrist pyramid schemes like this one!

Which has a Founder's Statement:

...
Meanwhile, the dysfunction in Washington just kept getting worse.  I wrote The Centrist Manifesto when the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction process collapsed, as the two parties kowtowed to their most active and vocal members.
...

And Testimonials:

“The two extremes are tearing this nation apart with their stubborn rhetoric and lack of action. I refuse to just sit back and watch. Our country is worth fighting for!”

Phillip Slater, MD

And a Logo:

And everything!  (And you know it's not just some boiler-room, fly-by-night outfit when the graphic is named "logoplaceholder".)

You know, if I had been raised just a little more skeevy and glib, I could have gone into the Both Sider Long Con years ago and have enough squirreled away by now to retire in style.

Stupid Liberal.