Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- Birthday Fundraiser Edition

Today on "Meet the Press", war, plague, misery and the aristocracy of money.

Not actual war, plague, etc. , mind you, because that would make people's brains hurt.  Instead Murrica gets a rundown of how various horsemen of the apocalypse will run in various political spin claiming races to be run on November 4th this year in exotic locales like Kansas and Iowa and Isengard.

Also it turns out, in politics as in every other aspect of life in the Land of the Free, money is, y'know, a big, hairy deal. No. Really. Big, hairy deal. (Not Safe For Work)

And how better to explain this largeness and hairiness of this deal long after it is too late to do anything about it than in a manner best summed up as follows:

"This Sunday on Meet the Press: I, Chuck Todd, will buy booze for kids because Uncle Chuck is cool like that." *18-34 demo still ignores*

— Christian Lynch (@monsterLUNCH) October 26, 2014

From the Meet the Press transcript:

CHUCK TODD:

Well, we're America, and it'd be fair to say we do most things bigger in this country. And that's certainly true when it comes to elections and campaign spending. My man Luke Russert is here to talk about this. You've been crunching some numbers.

LUKE RUSSERT:

Indeed.

CHUCK TODD:

This stat’s unbelievable.

LUKE RUSSERT:

It's wild, Chuck. Remarkably, you could pay for 80 British general election campaigns with what's being spent on this year's midterms alone. And there's real concern about the role money is playing in our politics with some even going as far to argue our democracy is being bought and sold.

Wild indeed, oh poster child for wholly unearned privilege.

But this is a fundraising day after all, and I'm sure that Charlie Pierce will do the rounds and count the toe-tags sometime tomorrow. So just for for today, let us go back and back to my very first Sunday Morning Comin' Down. Back when Young Luke Russert was still the Kegger King of Boston College, and long before Brother Charles Pierce discovered Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, David Gregory or the many other slithery denizens of the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus.

The first SMCD post I ever did went up in April, 2005.  Since I did not know at the time if I was going to keep doing this, I had not yet picked out a title for the feature.  To show you how much has changed, the subject of the original Sunday show post was my take on the fascistic stylings of George Will.  You can still read it here, where it remains frozen in bloggy amber and encrusted with all of it's original, vintage 2005 spambot droppings.

But for today, I'll be reposting this from Christmas Eve, 2006.  (Yes, I write all the time in all kinds of weather.)

After which I will ask you for money.

Christmas (Eve) Morning Comin’ Down.

"How high is the bullshit, Momma?"

"Five feet high and risin'."

In which virtually every angstrom of the broadcast spectra is given over to GOP SpokesMommies. Because that’s what Baby Jesus would do!

And so we strap on our hollyhock codpiece and sugarplum cleats and run screaming into the gooey, smelly slack-water at the low ebb of a Mouse Circus Yule Tide.

So once more unto the Dearth, dear friends, once more…

On "Fox News Sunday" -- Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney; Archbishop of Washington Donald Wuerl; Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham.

Where Chris Wallace continues the proud Fox tradition of never “askin’” no Republican of the First Water nuthin’ that ain’t a softball or a teabag, allowing First Lady Macbeth to open her hellmouth and let the bats (vampire and brick) come winging out unchallenged.

Lynne Cheney: Our sense of mission has been there since the start. September 11th. Long Struggle. Children and grandchildren safe.

Wallace: Iraq? Rethink?

Cheney: Dick wakes up every morning committed to doing this important job. Well, first he has a fresh mug of virgin’s blood, reseats his heart plugs, and then leaps into the fray.

Wallace: And this damnable Democratic Congress?

Cheney: Well, we’ll “cooperate” so long as Dems dutifully bend over and grab their ankles. I personally have the sense there are bright lines. Torture Detainee policy. Police State v 2.1 Domestic Spying. Patriot Act. Freedom-hating Democrats consistently batter these programs and argue against them. Oh, if only they loved this country! The Preznit will not let any “group” strip those important Imperial Perks away.

“Groups” like…80% of the American people.

Wallace: The Midterm Thumpin’?

Cheney: I blame extraordinary ethical failures. Bipartisan of course, but in the 6th year of any Imperial Reign this was to be expected.

Wallace: And Scooter Libby?

Cheney: Fine man and a pal ‘o Dick. In fact, they’re going hunting together! I think it’s bizarre that po’ Scooter is the only one going under the bus for the Valerie Plame dealie.

Wallace (batting his eyelashes and making kissy noises): Oh, Mommy, tell us all why historical education is important?

Because we – and the media particularly – spend so much time flailing our country and finding faults, that we need to teach the Little Ones the really really real true story of our unalloyed wonderfulness.

Wallace (braiding her hair and sighing coquettishly over her wonderfulness): But Mommy, how do you make it fun?

Wallace (treading so lightly that his tiny hooves leave nary a crease on the rice paper): What about the Mary Cheney kerfuffle? The new Grandcheney?

Cheney: We like being grandparents. Mary’ll be a great mother. Period.

Wallace: But what about this horrible, horrible War on Christmas?

Cheney: There IS a war on Christmas! There is!

Cheney: But we should be considerate of all the non-saved, hellbound heathens out there, so, for example, we had a menorah at our Christmas Party. In fact, some of my Best Ornaments are Jewish!

Cheney: And a big shout out to the troops! Thanks for putting your ass on the line for my husband’s delusions of grandeur!

Then onto the God Squad...

Mrs. Lotz: Our spirituality in America ignores the One True God. What is wrong is the object of our faith. We make Gods up. That’s the problem.

Archbishop: We are where we have always been. Our struggle is to not let the spirit get overwhelmed by the commercial/material world.

Immigrants?

Preach to ‘em.

Stem Cell research?

Every blastocyst is sacred.
Every blastocyst is great.
If a blastocyst is wasted, God gets quite irate.

And so we get 15 minutes of the Good Hair Good News Conservative evangelizing in the guise of news.

Not exactly a shock on Jebus’s Fake Birthday on God’s Favorite network.



On "Meet the Press" -- Rev. Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Life"; Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham.

Whither Jebus?

Americans like Faithy Leaders.

Both sides wrong. Both sides bad. Both sides rude. Both side uncivil.

If only both side would take a breathe and treat the other with respect.

With all due respect, fuck that.

We tried that for 30 years.

The Right adopted Hate Radio and Christopathology as a curative to its paranoid White Southern fantasies of persecuted minorityhood. The GOP took every crossburning freak and Bible-banging bigot into the fold to win elections.

Period.

Preaching that the problem with our nation is that I need to continue to be civil to a people and party that have carefully cultivated blind, boundless, self-satesfied hatred of everyone I care about and everything I believe in ain't gonna fly anymore.

We tried it. For 30 years. It. Doesn't. Work.

When the Right disarms and lays down their weaponized Scriptures, Liberals will disarm and go back to being the open, tolerant people we are by nature.

Until then, fuck these people. Sideways.

Rick Warren: The 20th Century saw the death of millions and millions of people at the hands of atheists – far more than Christians ever killed. Godless Communism. Nazism…

Which is where Godwin's Law pops up like a Bouncing Betty and one must loudly call “bullshit”.

Saving for another day the argument that the Infallible and Omnipotent Dear Leader cults of Stalinism and Maoism were anything but “godless”, it is simply ridiculous to assert that Hitler would have been possible without Germany’s long, rich history of unadulterated, Christian hatred.

To make the preposterous inference that Nazism was not (and is not) Christian right down to the shiny tips of its jackboots because it’s oppressive or anti-Democratic and authoritarian ignores oh, say, the last 1,700 years of the Catholic Church.

Pretending Teutonic fascism doesn’t have everything to do with a deep, Protestant taproot that goes all the way to Martin Luther’s second-and-now-scrupulously-underreported best seller, “On the Jews and Their Lies” is both ludicrous and dangerous, and in doing so, Rick Warren – whatever his other virtues – demonstrates the terrible rot that threatens the marrow of all faiths: That willingness to wish away unhappy reality when it does not conform to our pretty, shiny theology.

And thus do men of faith ignore the wide-gauge tracks as they are laid right up the gut of the transept, out the narthex and into the death house.

Now was Nazism a terrible perversion of Christianity?

Absolutely.

So is Fundamentalism.

So is Roman Catholicism.

So is the Westboro Baptist Church.

So is Bob Jones University.

So was the predicate for Slavery.

So is the 700 Club.

So is Focus on the Family

So was the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

So what was your point again?


On "This Week" -- Sens. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C; U.N. Secretary-General-designate Ban Ki-moon; former President Bush and his wife, Barbara.

Whither Syria?

Of visiting Syria, the White House sez, “Bad, Senators! Bad!”

Dodd: Screw that. Ignoring a major regional player is stupid. You don’t have to love them, like them or want to dine with them, but your do have to talk to them.

Graham: No. Talking to dictators is bad. “The world” should hold Syria accountable.

“The World” should do a lot of stuff. Like rain chocolate on my birthday, and voluntarily cool down, spontaneously sweep the air and water clean, and cough up some more oil - preferable in stable places like Nebraska or Disneyland -- so that we can drive Space Shuttle-sized SUVs everywhere on $0.32/gallon gas forever.

But that’s not going to happen either.


"Face the Nation" Guests: -- First Lady Laura Bush.

Why bother?

“The Chris Matthews Show” -- Dan Rather, Clarence Page, Katty Kay, Norah O’Donnell

A Laundry List of best, worst, most, least, wankiest, wackiest, wickedest, and so forth.

All head and no beer.

Except for this little sip of Noron’s weeping, self-serving, faux-center bilge: “In America, you can’t be moderate or objective anymore! Now you have to be either Democratic or Republican!”

Nurse! 5,000 cc’s of fainting couch! Stat!

Oh, the horror. That to take a position on anything or in opposition to anything –- global warming, evolution, slavery, the Holocaust, the shape of the Earth -- means that you are, by Big Giant Head Media definition, immoderate and irrational.

Then Noron immediately violates her own idiot, “objective” catechism and says flatly that Iraq is getting worse!

But…but…Noron, there are people living in bunkers and basement and blogs all over this fair land that assert that Iraq is getting better.

That we’re winning!

That it’s all the fault of the traitor media for not reporting the Good News that positively flows through the streets of Baghdad like Peeps sailing on a river of mulled wine.

In other words, Noron Takes a Position, thereby giving up her Big Media journalistic maidenhead and making her, by definition, immoderate and irrational and no longer worthy of our attention.

So take a biiiig pull off that bottle of Ol’ Doc Friedman’s Ersatz Centrist Patent Medicine you’re so hot to hawk to everyone else, Noron.

Mmmm. Brackish!

This is the part where I ask you for dough:

PS (and repeat). I'm trying to put together a series of "Best Of" posts for this fundraiser, and would like your suggestions as to what I should haul out of storage and repost this week. I am away from the computer for longer and longer stretches these days so please be patient when posting comments -- I will approve/publish them as fast as I can.

PSS (and repeat).  If you are one of the small group who donates to this blog on a monthly basis, this fundraising appeal is not directed at you. You bastids are already more than generous and I appreciate it more than I can say.

Thanks!

Your pal,

driftglass