Sunday Morning Comin' Down

I hear tell that Bob Schieffer did a decent job of dribbling King Cotton around the count by asking him "questions" about "issues"

SCHIEFFER: Well, Senator, are you planning to contact any other of our adversaries around the country? For example, do you plan to check with the North Koreans to make sure that they know that any deal has to be approved by the Congress?

and

SCHIEFFER: How does it make America stronger to tell them that any agreement they make with this administration may not be worth the paper it's written on and may not last beyond this presidency? How does that make things better?

I'd say Bob shamed him, but newer Koch 1000 model killbots don't leave the factory floor without being severely tested to make sure no hint of a conscience was accidentally left in the wheel well by some drunk assembly line worker.

Still, good on you, Bob.

Further down the dial, Chuck Todd was forced to cut his Hillary!Email!Bengaaaazi! show a little short so that he could pair a Republican with a Centrist Democrat so as to stage a pretend bipartisan "teaching the controversy" moment over the actions of the 47 seditious children with whom Republican voters have stocked the Worlds Greatest Deliberative Body.

CHUCK TODD:
By the way, that distracting background noise is courtesy of Vice. That's how they decided to release the clip. We tried our best to try to tone it down, there wasn't much we could do. Anyway, for more on Iran, I'm joined by Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, he's chair of the Republican National Senatorial Committee, member of the leadership. He signed that letter.

And Democrat Tim Kaine, a Virginia member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, who have actually been critical of a lot of the signers, but very skeptical of any deal that could get cut with Iran on the nuclear front. Senators Kaine and Wicker, welcome back to Meet the Press for both of you. Senator Wicker, let me just start with you. This morning, I know some senators have regretted some parts of the letter. Do you have any regrets on signing the letter, on who it was addressed to, and how this controversy bubbled up this week?

But my mind is on other matters, so in lieu of a SMCD beaujolais nouveau, I went down to the cellar and got a bottle of the 2007 reserve.

Jeez, I've been doing this a long time.

Sorry, but today, this is all I can do.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down


Mouse Circus: The Director’s Cut (Sorry, seem to have over-written the previous, placeholder post)

driftglass (VO)

"Sunday, shit. It’s still only in Sunday. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in the jungle.

When I was home after my first Mouse Circus, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing...

When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.

I've been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute Chris Wallace squats in his own poo he gets stronger.

Each time I look around the walls move in a little tighter.

Everyone gets everything he wants.

I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one.

Brought it up to me like room service.”

On “Face the Nation”

Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

Schieffer (recounting a smattering of the sins and crimes of “Baby Face” Gonzalez: But does this even matter to the Average American?

Schieffer: Its all very, very arcane, which is why Average Americans has a problem following it.

driftglass: The Average American doesn’t vote. The Average American doesn’t read. For amusement, the Average American watches one game show after another featuring people pitted against each other like red and black ants in paint shaker. The Average American wouldn’t pay attention to the Second Coming if the Messiah were pureed, set afire and catheterized up their urethra.

Fuck the Average American.

Leahy: You follow the law. I follow the law. It is the Administration’s position that they do not have to follow the law.

Schieffer: So what should the Preznit do?

Leahy: Well some say he should fire Gonzalez. But he needs to go further and make it clear that no one is above the law as a matter of principle.

driftglass: It always sadly amuses me when media and political persons recount the reasonable things that any President should do in this or that crisis knowing full well but never, ever, ever daring to say that the reason it’ll never happen is because Dubya is out of his fucking mind and none of the gel-based Profiles in Courage over in the Impeach Bill Clinton Party At Any Cost have the guts God gave flatworms.


On “Meet the Press”

Tim Russert

Dan Balz and Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd of NBC News, Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times and John Harwood of CNBC.

Hoss race toutin’.

Feh.

If I want to see overpaid men running in meaningless circles, NASCAR is only a click away...


On “Fox News Sunday”

Driftglass reminder that the Department of Justice is to Justice what Fox New is to News.

Russ Feingold straps into a HazMat suit and video conferences in, after Noot! Does his Noot! thing all over the furniture.


Noot! The Whole Candidate Selection Process is fundamentally broken. Making people stand on stage in line and answer questions indeed!

Noot! The American System is fundamentally, deeply, massively failed as evidenced by the fact that I am not the President, and no one has come and meekly offered me the crown.

Noot! In 1861 Lincoln gave a 77 hour speech and people gave birth grew old and died during it! And now these pissants stand meekly in line, answering questions! From teevee personalities and smelly peasants. Well cheese and crackers, I have never heard of anything so demeaning.

Idiotic Premise #1: That “size matters”. Anyone -- Noot! Included – is welcome to stand on any street corner and give any speech of any length they choose. No one is stopping you. But as Noot! full well knows, fortnight stem-winders do not fit into the teevee format. That you can talk all you want but nobody’ll listen doesn’t mean the system is broken.

It's called d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y. See also b-l-o-g-g-i-n-g and 3-r-d c-l-a-s-s m-a-i-l.

Idiotic Premise #2: That brevity = System!Failure!.

I was gonna be nice, but since Noot! had to go and drag Lincoln into this…

In 1863, Lincoln was invited to give a few, concluding remarks at the public dedication of a war cemetery; a speaker named Edward Everett gave the main address, which lasted over two hours (which Noot! seems to think is the golden benchmark of a speech given in a system in perfect condition).

And even a very learned American couldn’t tell you who the fuck Edward Everett was or one, single phrase from his two-hour speech if you put a gun to their head.

Lincoln's speech –- now known as The Gettysburg Address and indisputably one of the masterpieces of the English language -- was a mere 246 words long,

And God Herself stopped what She was doing and wept when he delivered it.

BTW, Lincoln’s other most brilliant piece of oratory – his Second Inaugural – clocked in at 698 words.

Funny. You'd think as a Big Time History Guy and author of crappily-written books about the past, Noot! would’ve known that?

The co-author of “Gettysburg” continues…

Noot!; Each Party is disqualified to govern. Republicans don’t understand how fucked up things are, and Democrats are Evil Liberal Baby-Eating Swamp Things who want to Socialize us into the Dark Ages.

The Noot! Solution? He’s gonna have a Big Idea'r Conference.

For example, Noot! has discovered that the education system sucks in Detroit. That we need to fundamentally replace the Detroit public school system. Which has been destroyed, according to Noot! entirely by the Teacher’s Unions.

No half-measures with Noot! Everything is always Fundamentally, Irretrievably, Apocalyptically, Sub-Atomically fucked up.

And to a certain extent, he’s right, and history will record the fuckuppedness of everything by another name.

It will be known as “The Republican Legacy”.

Noot! manages to drive through the whole of the collapse of Detroit with no mention of GM, Ford or the complete mismanagement of the auto sector by Big Money for the last 30 year, and the resulting implosion of the economy and middle class.

You'd think a Big Time History Guy would’ve picked up on that...

Of course, Noot! never had and never will have any genuinely Big Ideas. He just has a Big Vocabulary and a tiny-brained Base who cannot tell the difference.

Noot! on Abu Gonzalez: I don’t agree with the Democrats 293rd investigation of stuff. Dems have gone irrationally overboard in this desire to investigate everything.

But Abu Gonzalez is a bad AG and is hurting the Children somehow.

Wallace: What do you have to say about the Democrats and how they want to lose in Iraq and sell us out to the terrorists? Isn’t that a bad thing?

Noot!: Well now that you mention it, the left wing of the Democratic Party (that’d be me) wants Americans to lose. Wants us defeated.

In 1975, the Left Wing of the Democratic Party killed the government of South Vietnam.

How can you in good conscience walk away from the good people in Iraq.

We have seen this happen in Afghanistan; the Taliban coming back and killing children on their way to school!

Idiotic Premise #1: No one is arguing anything regarding Afghanistan except that it is where we should be and should have focused out efforts since September 12th, 2001, and that the Bush Administration has fucking it up. Badly.

Idiotic Premise #2: If Fox News blobs ever paid attention to trifling details they might notice the fact that the failure in Afghanistan limns nothing so much as the complete bankruptcy of the Bush Doctrine…which is precisely what Noot! is allegedly championing.

Noot! has not changed one iota; he is still the same loathsome, cowardly, hateful, slander-at-the-drop-of-a-hat fascist he has ever been.

And he still speaks for the Republican Party

Then on to Russ Feingold;

Wallace: But Petraeus is going to save us. Why oh why won’t you Dirty Liberals listen to the Gentiles on the Ground Fein-gold.

Russ: I’ll listen to him respectfully, but not exclusively. And I remind you we have already received assurance after assurance from this Administration regarding Iraq, all of which have proven to be a tissue of lies and bullshit year after year.

Wallace: This is all technical stuff that our dimwit viewers cannot possibly comprehend. Therefore shouldn’t we drop it?

Russ: Fuck you. This needs to be at least investigated.

Wallace: But to investigate one the Dear Leader’s minions? How dare you look the Dear Leader directly in the eye!

Russ: Why wouldn’t you do that? Why wouldn’t any responsible legislature want to find out what has gone wrong and why and fix the fucker?

Wallace: The Preznit needs FISA to be changed to save the children! Why don’t Democrats want to save the children?

Russ: Just easing foreign-to-foreign restrictions? No problem. We have a deal. We can do that in a day. But this is the scam they propose every time.. With the Patriot Act. With Military Commissions. They find one small, reasonable detail everyone agrees on. Then they load it up with a bunch of grotesque, power-grabbing trash, and try to ram it through.

And then they sit back and watch while minions like you, Chris, go monkeyshit over how unreasonable the Democrats are.

Wallace: Isn’t this just political theater with no smoking gun?

Russ: That’s why we want Rove and the rest to come down and testify? How can we tell you if evidence shows a smoking gun if the White House will not let us look at the evidence?


Wallace: BTW, we asked White House and Congressional Republicans to come down and defend Speedy Gonzalez and had no takers.

End Part 1.