Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Rhymes With 'You Blewitt'" Edition.

Donald Trump's successful nonstop lying strategy and the Planned Parenthood massacre had all the rodents at the Sunday Show Mouse Circus a little freaked out.  So no surprise that they used the occasion to demonstrate the firepower of their fully armed and operational drivel station!

Step One: stack the deck by making absolutely sure not a single Democrat appeared anywhere on any guest list of any Sunday show:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Guest lineups for the Sunday TV news shows:

ABC's "This Week" - Republican presidential candidates Ben Carson and John Kasich.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Carson; Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Carson; Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee; Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.

"Fox News Sunday" - Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina; Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.

Step Two: offer every Conservative crackpot the opportunity to slip into their shiniest Both Siderist camouflage and dominate the discussion of the Planned Parenthood shooting spree...

...Hugh Hewitt, who now appears to be periodically co-hosting Meet the Press with Shuck Todd, goes all the way back to 1970 to find a hippie to punch:

HUGH HEWITT:  Well, the rhetoric of the SD did have an impact on Weathermen. And they did kill people. And that's why rhetoric matters. But at the same time, we can't sanitize an issue. I will talk about the Planned Parenthood practices. They were selling baby parts. I will be happy to engage people. But I think we do have to recognize there are disturbed people on both ends of the spectrum who can be impacted by this language.

..S E "Sippy" Cupp on CNN who's whole schtick is saying ridiculous, horrifying things on teevee:

Cupp: Well, I think it's a terrible idea to blame debate for what is a horrific act of violence. If you're going to do that then you have to say that leftist rhetoric was to blame when Floyd Corkins went into the Family Research Center and shot at that office. That's just a wasteful exercise and to hear your former guest John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado suggest that we need to somehow change our tone or police our rhetoric because of the act of what I'm assuming is going to be a madman is a distractions and a waste. 

...and, of course, Mental Ben (h/t Karoli at Crooks & Liars):

Step Three: On Meet the Press, spare no expense to land that vital MTP!SUNDAY! EXCLUSIVE!INTERVIEW! with Donald Trump!  Of course, corporeal Donald Trump could not be bothered to show up in-person for Shuck Todd's MTP!SUNDAY! EXCLUSIVE!INTERVIEW! and so poor Shuck was forced to stutter and splutter indignantly at a picture of Donald Trump while Trump played him like a little tin drum over the phone.

...

DONALD TRUMP:  ...Now, the Washington Post also wrote about tailgate parties. We're looking for other articles. And we're looking for other clips. And I wouldn't be surprised if we found them, Chuck. But for some reason, they're not that easy to come by. I saw it. So many people saw it, Chuck. And, so, why would I take it back? I'm not going to take it back.

CHUCK TODD:  Well just because somebody repeats something doesn't make it true. And I guess that's actually--

DONALD TRUMP:  Chuck, I've had hundreds. I don't mean I had two calls, Chuck. Even yesterday, I was in Sarasota, Florida. And people were saying they lived in Jersey, they--

CHUCK TODD: People weren't saying. If I said people--

DONALD TRUMP:  --moved down to Florida because taxes are a lot lower in Florida. They told me there that they saw it.

CHUCK TODD:  Mr. Trump. If I said, "Well, people have said Mr. Trump's net worth is $10 billion," you would say that was crazy. You wouldn't make a business deal--

DONALD TRUMP:  But that's a very different. It's much different.

CHUCK TODD:  --based on re-tweets and based on hearsay. You're running for president of the United States. Your words matter. Truthfulness matters. Fact-based stuff matters.

DONALD TRUMP:  Take it easy, Chuck. Just play cool. This is people in this country that love our country that saw this, by the hundreds they're calling, and they're tweeting. And there's a lot of people. In Sarasota, people were telling me yesterday they used to live in New Jersey. They remember it vividly. They thought it was disgusting.

So, these are people that saw it, too. The Washington Post reported it. Many, many people have seen it. I have a very good memory, I'll tell you. I saw it somewhere on television many years ago. And I never forgot it. And it was on television, too.

CHUCK TODD:  Let me ask you about your reaction to what happened in Colorado...

To yank NBC's leash a little tighter and rub Todd's face in his utter failure as a journalist, the very next day Trump undercut the whole idea of a MTP!SUNDAY! EXCLUSIVE!INTERVIEW! by blowing in a much longer phone call to Todd's down-the-hall colleague and competitor, Joe Scarborough.  21 nauseating minutes of wingnut fawning, flattery, groveling and ass-kissing wrapped up in a bow to make up for any offense The Donald might have taken at Todd's half-assed ankle-biting the day before.

And, finally, to round out the nightmare, the Meet the Press panel spent what felt like hours climbing into their own coffins, nailing the lid shut from the inside, and whispering eulogies to their own failure and incompetence.

HUGH HEWITT:   Trump supporters are like Lincoln Chafee: blocks of granite. And they are not moving easily. And they're not going to move over the 9/11 story. And fact checkers are themselves perceived to be agenda driven, in many respects. And they would like to see an equal amount of the time given to Hillary Clinton's claim to being under sniper fire in Bosnia or trying to join the Marine Corps or any of her, as are given to Donald Trump. But here's the key thing. Elizabeth Loftus is a professor at the University of California Irvine who has done a TED Talk on memory, which people have to watch. Because memory is different from facts. You cannot fact check memory.

MOLLY BALL:  But here's the political genius of Donald Trump, right. What he is doing is different. All politicians say things that are technically true but a little bit misleading or a lot misleading.

CHUCK TODD:  Truth is conditional....

MOLLY BALL: Yes. They'll just talk about the definition of "is." Donald Trump doesn't do that. He creates an entire alternate reality. And he does not back down.

ANDREA MITCHELL:  Because he pays no price for it with his supporters.

He pays no price because you and your colleagues decided that it was more profitable to spend the last 20 years playing footsie with the American Fascist Party than reporting on what they were really up to.  And once they buffaloed you into selling out honest journalism in order to appease them -- into giving up on the truth altogether and playing the Both Sides Do It Russian roulette with your own profession instead -- they owned you.  They could name any price and you would meet it, including mainstreaming their madness by pulling out a chair at your Meet the Press table for conspiracy mongering Conservative crackpots.

In fact, there is one sitting next to you right...now...

His name rhymes with You Blewitt...

But please continue: future generations will be fascinated to see just how completely you sold out your profession and your country,

MOLLY BALL:  And it is seductive to people because it is the world they want to live in, not the real world.

CHUCK TODD:  We contended this weekend, are we living in a post-truth world. What's interesting here, what do voters want? Do they want honesty? Or do they want something else? Let me put up two different comparisons that we did in our last poll about the honest and trustworthy question between Trump and Hillary Clinton...

ANDREA MITCHELL: ... But the fact is that Trump is positing that he can take care of people. And raising people's fears, as you said, is incendiary. And I think that the fact of truthfulness doesn't matter, especially when people like us are doing the fact checking.

CHUCK TODD:  Well, it's funny you talk about this. Look, PolitiFact put this up. And I gotta to show you on this. On the candidates that have had the mostly false to false ratings, three have had a majority of the facts that have been fact checked by PolitiFact have been treated as false or mostly false.

And it's the top three candidates in the Republican side. So, it's Carson, Trump, and Cruz. Eugene, basically it goes to Hugh's point. The fact checkers are viewed as having an agenda. So, the more they say, "You're wrong," the more their supporters say, "They're right."...

EUGENE ROBINSON:  I know. And by the way, the fact checkers did fact check Hillary Clinton on her under-fire claims. You know, I mean, it's not as if they haven't done all this stuff.

HUGH HEWITT: Just intensity Eugene, just intensity of coverage.

...

ANDREA MITCHELL:   And it's because the media are less credible as fact checkers.

CHUCK TODD:   Yeah, and the government. All right. We're going to pause here...

This was all chewed up and regurgitated for consumption by the Pig People by inexplicable MSNBC regular and fully paid-up member of the Conservative conspiracy goon squad, Matt Lewis:

. @hughhewitt did a great job on MTP today explaining why liberal media outrage/selection bias helped create & empower Trump.

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) November 29, 2015

As I have written before, periodically we Liberals chase off the Wingnut Eaters of Worlds for a little while. We run them back off into the angry Confederate mud. Back into the gnawing belly of hate radio. Back into the Armageddonist wet dreams of their Christopath spider holes and morally deformed gospels.

And then some secret signal goes out among the Beltway Media.  Wagons are circled.  Both Siderist myrmidons are deployed in force.  Any dirty hippies who would dare point out that the Beltway clowns are once again restarting the nightmare that almost wrecked the country last time are muzzled and cast out.

Then -- surprise! -- the Wingnut Eaters of Worlds come roaring back, twice as loud, twice as well-funded and twice as immune to factual reality.

And the Beltway clowns sit around their teevee tables, rending their $10,000 garments, wondering once again how on Earth is has come to this, and once again not daring to face anyone who would give them an honest, unvarnished answer to their stupid, stupid question.