Just imagine how different the world would be if the Catholic Church had had the foresight to just buy the Boston Globe outright.
Well, while the American Fascist Party continues to attract hoopla and horror on the national stage...
...down below the radar, deep inside America's Laboratories of Democracy, while the institutional Left continues to lose ground and throw nickles around like manhole covers, the Right continues to spend whatever it takes to control the means of of message production.
Illinois News Network buying Illinois Radio Network
By Bernard Schoenburg
Posted Dec. 28, 2015 at 1:25 PM
Updated Dec 29, 2015 at 11:08 AM
The Illinois News Network, a media arm of the Illinois Policy Institute, is acquiring the Illinois Radio Network, which has reporters in Springfield and Chicago and provides news reports to stations throughout the state, including WTAX-AM in Springfield.
“We are thrilled to have Illinois Radio Network becoming a part of INN,” said John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, in a news release. “Both organizations have a history of promoting transparency and accountability in government. And we look forward to continuing that fine tradition.”
IRN is being acquired from Saga Communications Inc., which will continue to own WTAX and other Capitol Radio Group stations in Springfield.
Mike Lawrence, a longtime Statehouse reporter who became former GOP Gov. Jim Edgar’s press secretary and is retired from being director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, called the sale an “unfortunate development.”
“The Illinois Policy Institute ... is a group that has a very definite ideological agenda, and I would be surprised if it did anything else other than to advance that agenda through its newly acquired operation,” Lawrence said...
As I mentioned in February, the INN started out life as the propaganda arm of another well-funded Koch Brothers front group with deep roots in all the usual, radical Hobbsean madness to which all those groups swear allegiance (Hail Hydra!). Thank to the financial backing of crackpot Right-wing billionaires (including $625,000 from Governor Hedgefund since 2009) the IPI has been able to focus on cranking out free ALEC/wingnut "content" and white papers for newspapers to pad out the empty places where journalism used to be before they started laying reporters off in droves.
Then, after Governor Hedgefund was sworn in, he turned to his pals at the IPI to help him staff his administration and enact the terrible policies about which they had been dreaming for years:
Rauner administration hires three from Illinois Policy Institute
And now the circle is complete: the Koch brothers Illinois Conservative propaganda outlet will finally own it's distribution network.
In 2007, the housing bubble collapsed.
In 2000, the dot-com bubble collapsed.
In 1637, the tulip bubble collapsed.
Tulip mania reached its peak during the winter of 1636–37, when some bulbs were reportedly changing hands ten times in a day. No deliveries were ever made to fulfil any of these contracts, because in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt. The collapse began in Haarlem, when, for the first time, buyers apparently refused to show up at a routine bulb auction. This may have been because Haarlem was then at the height of an outbreak of bubonic plague. While the existence of the plague may have helped create a culture of fatalistic risk-taking that allowed the speculation to skyrocket in the first place, this outbreak might also have helped to burst the bubble.
Eventually they all do.
But after 30 years, the unhinged Conservative bed-wetting bubble is still going strong.
Every day, reality slaps it in the face over and over again. Every day it piles the sandbags of delusion, rage and paranoia higher around itself a little. And every day, the unhinged Conservative bed-wetting bubble continues to pay off at 10-to-1 because the operators of the Conservative media and political machine continue to profit handsomely from feeding their madness.
Eventually the tulip and dot-com and housing bubbles collapsed because the shared delusion was ultimately based on tangible proposition which could not survive scrutiny. But the toxic asset which keeps the unhinged Conservative bed-wetting bubble going is not the value of a flower bulb or a NINJA mortgage, but the ever-shifting matrix of batshit conspiracies that are constantly rat-scuttling around in the skulls of millions and million of Conservatives.
It’s not so much that the country needs a third political party — we need a second political party, one that represents everyone who isn’t an illegal alien, a crony capitalist, a hack, a welfare recipient or a beneficiary of one form or another of government favoritism or largesse.
Wait, you say, don’t we already have the Republican Party? Yes, and that’s the problem. As a Democratic governor from Alabama used to say, there’s no longer a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.
It’s Democrats and Democrats Lite. Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.
Exhibit A: The so-called omnibus spending bill passed in the dark of night this week by a 316-113 vote in the U.S. House. The new House speaker, a RINO named Paul Ryan, described it as a “bipartisan compromise.” He was so proud of his work that he dumped it out on the night of the GOP debate in Las Vegas...
There is no market force which can burst this bubble because there is no longer any external reality which unhinged Conservative bed-wetters recognize as valid. It has withstood wave after wave of unremitting disaster. humiliation and failure. Lose elections, win elections, doesn't matter. Get the war you wanted, the tax cuts you wanted, the president you wanted, the deregulatory idiocy you wanted..and when it all falls down they just change their war paint, wish the past away and play Blame the Negro for seven years.
There is no force which can burst this bubble except you and me.
Because I haven't done a "WDS" in awhile, and because she raises up friend Batocchio's great and good annual Swifties! A feat for which songs should be sung and medals struck:
... If you've been around the liberal blogosphere for any time you know that my friend and sometime Hullabaloo contributor, Batocchio of the blog Vagabond Scholar, hosts the annual Jon Swift Memorial round-up of Best Blog Posts every year. People think the liberal blogosphere is no longer around and it just ain't true. Most of these blogs have been around as long as I have and they're churning out great stuff year after year. You can follow many of them on Facebook and twitter or just do it the old-fashioned way --- bookmark 'em or get them on your RSS feed. Bloggers will keep you sane because they are not of the mainstream political world or even the so-called "professional left." They're liberal indies. You'll see a lot of humor and analysis that you'll never see anywhere else. As always, this year's Swifties offers an impressive list of truly informative, entertaining and important blog posts written by some of your favorite writers as well as some you may not know but should. If you're looking for something good to read online over this long holiday week I urge you to check out these offerings. Anyway, included in this year's great list of readings are posts written by people who also write here regularly, Tom Sullivan, Gaius Publius and Spocko. I'm just going to list the names and the titles. You can click over to Vagabond Scholar for the story of the Jon Swift awards and the links to all these great pieces: The Professional Left Podcast Episode 295 (July 31, 2015): "Is Cecil the Lion a Proxy War?" Blue Gal: "Cecil the Lion – Environmental crime and misplaced rage." A Blog About School "Standardized tests and your cat’s body mass index" Chris Liebig Infidel753 "Long war, decisive battle" Infidel753: "Why does the right wing invest the fight against gay rights with such existential importance? Deep down they know it's a crucial part of a much longer and more fundamental conflict over the essential nature and identity of our civilization." You Might Notice a Trend "Insanity Is Repeating the Same Shooting Over And Over Again and Expecting a Safer Gun-Happy Result" Paul Wartenberg: "The United States is under attack from itself as a minor group of gun-worshiping sociopaths allow – and in some ways encourage – shooting deaths on a daily basis just so they can proclaim their devotion to a metal god of death." Mad Kane's Political Madness "St. Boehner???" Madeleine Begun Kane: "3-Verse Limerick mocking the so-called "sacrifice" John Boehner made in giving up his Speakership." World O' Crap "World's Worst Toys R Us Spokesmodel" Scott Clevenger: "Who can forget Sabrina Corgatelli, the sultry, seductive Idaho accountant who went to Africa, wrapped a dead giraffe around her body like a mink stole, and sang "Blood Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"? " The Debate Link "Anti-Semitism as Structural and the Iran Deal Debate" David Schraub: "Many critics of the Iran Nuclear Deal have contended that deal proponents have engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric; proponents have roundly rejected the charge. Both camps, I argue, are mistaken in the processes by which anti-Semitism operates and has its effect in contemporary society." Kiko's House "When Things Fell Seriously Apart & The Center Didn't Hold" Shaun D. Mullen: " We'll motor past how the brilliant Yeats, as prescient as he could be, foresaw this political season and the coming of Donald Trump nearly 100 years ago in his classic dirge for the decline of civilization, but today even the best in the overcrowded Republican field seem to lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity, and surely some revelation is at hand. Or so we should fear." Zencomix "Beyond Here There Be Dragoons" Dave Dugan: "Watercolor, Pen & ink on handmade paper, about 8 cm x 11 cm for each image, contained in a small gift box with a velcro closure, decorated with white exterior house paint and india ink, marking 70 years of goddamn nuclear weapons..." Pruning Shears "On the sorry state of American fascism" Dan: "A look at some of the more hyperbolic claims about so-called 'PC culture.' " David E's Fablog "Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa" David Ehrenstein: "It's about how Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" is as valid today as it was in 1960 in showing how the media actually works." Experiential Pagan "Innocence Lost" Syrbal/Labrys: "A brief memory that proves 'the more things change, the LESS they stay the same' – at least for a female." Confession Zero "With the Wind it Shall" Mark Prime offers a poem. Scrutiny Hooligans "Sellin' the big nothin' " Tom Sullivan: "In the military we hold up as representing America's highest ideals, it's all esprit de corps and teamwork. Yet outside the base perimeter in Anytown, USA, it's screw you, I’ve got mine. (Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.)" Strangely Blogged "47 Dumbass Ronin" Vixen Strangely: "The idea that 47 actual US Senators got together to show this particular letter and their behinds off to the world struck me as a suggestion that perhaps they hated President Obama more than they even liked their country." Simply Left Behind "How to Defeat Terrorism" actor212: "Thirty years of war (going back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) has done nothing but make more rabid dogs. That's a failed policy. This is not a war against people, it's a war against an ideology – the ideology of jihad – and every time we've bombed a country, we created more enemies as we've attempted to wipe out that ideology." Real American Liberal "Diving into the Abortion Debate" John Sheirer: "I tried to have a civil, reasonable discussion about abortion on the Internet. The results were even more disturbing than I anticipated." Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I "Republicans May Be Perfidious Bastards, But the Democrats Are Still Idiots" Comrade Misfit: "Essentially, why the Democrats' focus on gun control will hurt them." Shakesville "Jeanie Bueller's Day of Feminist Killjoying" Melissa McEwan: "In which I reconsider "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" 30 years later and discover that I'm rooting for little sister Jeanie Bueller, who huffs and eyerolls and shouts indignantly through the film, a perfect picture of injustice in a pink cardigan." Spocko's Brain "Mr. Robot Will Scratch The Corporate Justice Problem in Your Brain" Spocko: "Mr. Robot was the most fascinating TV show I watched this year. The lead, Elliot, is a cyber-security engineer by day and vigilante hacker by night. His target is "Evil Corp" a sort of BofA, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, JPMorganChase combo. In this post I reviewed the pilot and anticipated the ethical, technical, financial and human issues it will grapple with over the season." M.A.Peel "The Songs Our Mothers Sang to Us" Ellen O'Neill: "The news of the BBC's discovery of Diana Rigg's Desert Island Disc lead me to their wonderful website. Where I stumbled on Yoko Ono's desert selections, and her anecdote about a particular song & her mother poignantly, surprisingly linked her to me and my mom." Kathleen Maher's Pure Fiction "If He Wished" Fiction by Kathleen Maher. Poor Impulse Control "The World Is the World" Tata: "You can be a different person every day, and by you, I mean me." Mock Paper Scissors "Hell Hath No Fury Like A Boomer Scorned" Tengrain: "MoDo writes a poisoned pen letter to Hillary Clinton using Joe and Beau Biden as the ink." The Rectification of Names "What's to stop me from marrying my television?—Ross, I think you did." Yastreblyansky: "Back in May, as we were all awaiting the Obergefell decision, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, decided to show us how marriage equality was going to lead to polygamy for all, and then how are you liberals going to like that? Spoiler: He was wrong." Indomitable "American Exceptionalism? ISIS and the Christian Right are More Alike Than Different" Chauncey DeVega: "The American Christian Right-wing and ISIS are much more alike than different. This truth is upsetting because American Exceptionalism is based on a lie. On matters of violence, extreme religion, anti-Cosmopolitanism, and a yearning for End Times battles between countries ruled "god's law" ISIS and the American Christian Dominionists and Reconstructionists are in almost total agreement." driftglass "At The Pillory Clinton Hearing" driftglass: "An experimental, real-time, free-form, impressionistic interpretation of the Hillary Clinton Benghaaaazi show trial in October." The Way of Cats "The difference between dogs and cats" Pamela Merritt: "Dogs do sports. Cats do theater. They are two very different kinds of pets, and require two wildly different approaches for care and training." Anibundel: Pop Culturess "Good Morning and Welcome to Force Friday" Ani Bundel: "In case you haven't heard, today the 4th will be with you. But it's not May the 4th, the organic holiday that sprung up in the Star Wars community in the last decade. Today is a different fourth. One invented by Disney, to go along with their marketing department's plans for total Star Wars world domination." Self-Styled Siren "Claude Rains: An Actor's Side-Eye" Farran Smith Nehme: "My posting rate slowed considerably this year, but this was by far the most popular thing I wrote for the blog. Sifting through stills from all stages of the career of the great Rains was a wonderful experience." Perrspectives "Sorry, Jeb. Your Brother Did Create ISIS." Jon Perr: "Jeb Bush got schooled by a 19 year-old college student who informed him, "You brother created ISIS." Or to put in terms even Republican myth-makers can understand: ISIS? George W. Bush built that." The Rude Pundit "America Has Become a Second Amendment Death Cult" Lee Papa: "The United States is on the same road as the Mayans and the Aztecs as we shoot ourselves into oblivion." Ramona's Voices "As Long As There Is A Constitution, The GOP Can't Win" Ramona Grigg: "So the crazies won the 2014 midterms. What, me worry? Yes, me worry." [this space intentionally left blank] "I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened" Dallas Taylor: "Post details the experience and results of a year spent reading only books by women: why I did it (as both writer and reader), what it was like, what I learned from it, and how it changed me. Concludes with encouragement for the reader to try the same, or at least examine the reasons for refusing to do so." Doctor Cleveland "Winnowing the GOP Field with Jane Austen" Doctor Cleveland AKA Jim Marino: "Demonstrates the Pareto principle with the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice and then applies it to the crowded GOP primary field, showing which candidates have never been in the running. A post so crazy it just might work." The Hunting Of The Snark "Guts And Glory: The Story Of Ross Douthat" Susan of Texas: "This is a review of Ross Douthat's book about his years at Harvard,Privilege: Harvard And The Education Of The Ruling Class. In this book we see how the son of "ex-hippies" reshaped himself into an authoritarian thought leader without becoming either thoughtful or a leader." The Inverse Square "We Have a Problem With Guns" Tom Levenson: "Guns are not toys. They’re profit centers. As long as we accept that, we get the culture — political and more — that might be expected. This post is another way of writing how sick I am of having to say In Memoriam…." Show Me Progress "The Bill of Rights applies to everyone, right?" Michael Bersin: "An interview with anti-Obama open carrying teabaggers flying large Confederate battle flags (among others) in an overpass protest on U.S. 50 in west central Missouri." Lotus – Surviving a Dark Time "Only the poor face drug tests to receive any public aid or benefit" LarryE (Larry Erickson): "The content should be clear from the title: Drug testing of the poor – and only of the poor – to qualify for a public benefit is expanding." Eunoia "Timetraveller's' Reunion Ole Phat Stu: "Some of the consequences of time travel." Bark Bark Woof Woof "Gay Day at the Supreme Court" Mustang Bobby: "Written on the morning of oral arguments for marriage equality before the Supreme Court in April: 'If I cannot be treated the same way as everyone else for no other reason than an innate quality such as sexual preference, then the rest of those rights, however noble, are meaningless.' " Empire Of The Senseless "Hold my Life" zombie rotten mcdonald: "A review of the recent Replacements reunion shows, and reminiscence…" and that's the way it was "Don’t help ISIS get what it wants" Derek Davison: "I'm my own worst critic when it comes to evaluating my writing, but this piece, written in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attack, is the most widely-read and shared thing I've ever written for my own blog. I try to explain why overreacting to ISIS's terrorism—by rejecting refugees, by turning on Muslims living in our own communities, by panicking—is giving the terrorists exactly what they want and what they need to perpetuate their message" This Is So Gay "Onward, Christian Soldiers" Duncan Mitchel: "If you're using the Bible to hurt people, you're using it wrong: you should be using a sword, or a battle axe, as the Lord intended. You can't do any serious, God-breathed damage with a floppy leather-covered book!" Checking Out Your Shorts "Behind the Politics – Scott Walker" paleotectonics: ""VH-1 Behind The Music meets the Scott Walker Campaign, takes much acid." Gaius Publius "Climate Change, the "Free Market" & the California Drought" Gaius Publius offers an overview of the situation. Bluestem Prairie "No small potatoes: Dept of Natural Resources requires EAW for pinelands to spud fields project" Sally Jo Sorensen: "When the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources announced a discretionary environmental assessment worksheet (EAW) for an area where the R.D. Offutt Company, America's largest potato company, been buying forest land and converting it to potato fields, bushels of money set the stage for a later withdrawal of the study." Balloon Juice "It’s a Giant Fucking Mystery Wrapped Inside A Riddle Inside an Enigma" John Cole sounds off about the "enigma" of the Planned Parenthood shooting. p3: Persuasion, Perseverance, and Patience "Sunday morning toons: Fear of a Trump planet! And other horrors." Nothstine: "A December 2015 edition of p3's weekly round up of political cartoons (with a dash of Golden Age animation). This week the theme was Fear!" [49] Mister Tristan "Liars" Gary, a relative of Mister Tristan: "Liars' pants should actually burst into flames. Brian Williams paid a price for lying about Iraq; Dick Cheney, not so much." alicublog "Roots" Roy Edroso: "It’s less overtly political than most of my stuff, but also (I hope) funnier." bjkeefe "Now THAT's something to ponder" Brendan Keefe: "Since I haven't been writing much at length lately, I'll pass along one of the most fun things I read this past year." Schrodinger's Cat: Many Worlds and One Cat "Bihar Gives India a Diwali Gift: An In-Depth Analysis of the Assembly Elections" schroedinger's cat: "I analyze the state assembly elections held in the Indian state of Bihar where Prime Minister Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered a humiliating defeat. I explore what this means for India now in the context of the recent past and in the historical context."
Lance Mannion "Nobody's unbreakable, not even Kimmy Schmidt" Lance Mannion: "The premise of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt isn't comic. It's tragic. A real evil has been inflicted upon Kimmy and her friends from the bunker and, whatever the outcome of the trial, the villain has gotten away with it. What he did to the four women cannot be undone. The comedy is in Kimmy's determination to survive the evil." Vagabond Scholar "Blogiversary X: 10 Posts That Shook the World (or Slightly Amused a Dozen People)" Batocchio: "I didn't write much this year, but this post links the best pieces of my first decade by category." Click here for the links.
In a typically horrid, horse-race-tout-sheet article entitled, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenngarry Glenn Ross"13 times Trump looked finished, and wasn't", Politico notes that...
Since his June 16 announcement, political prognosticators, pundits and yes, even journalists have speculated that Trump would not last. And each time they did, the blustery Manhattan mogul continued to pick up steam, in spite of, and perhaps because of that speculation.
With the onset of winter, Trump's campaign has now weathered all seasons, girding for battle not only in Iowa and New Hampshire but also with a media and a coastal chattering class that has predicted that this — no, this — no, this — would finally be the episode to sink his ship. But unlike the Titanic, the icebergs that would sink a conventional campaign have left nary a dent. In fact, he closes out the year with a daunting double-digit lead over his closest rival, Ted Cruz.
From June 16 to the present, these are the big moments that caused people to prematurely predict Trump's demise...
Ironically, one of the few areas of agreement we Liberals have with the Trumpistas is that the political press are mostly useless and utterly corrupt ratings whores. However, our fragile bipartisan consensus breaks down at this point, with Trumpistas swearing that the corrupt and useless media are vassals of the Secret Liberal Media Conspiracy which has ruined Murrica, while we on the Left despair that, Holy Jebus, they really are that stupid.
Look, I genuinely don't care about this latest "Golly, isn't it a hoot how fucking useless we are?" exercise in media-jerking-itself-off-in-the-mirror-and-calling-it-self-examination any more than I care about the last dozen, or two dozen, or five dozen times that we heard the Beltway frottaging a mountain of money while yelling "I'm a bad boy! I'm a bad boy!" from the media master bathroom upstairs. The entire apparatus is corrupt from wallet to hair-cut and nothing short of breaking it up and firing the ringleaders will change that.
But for the record, I do once again feel perversely compelled to point out that within 48 hours of the very first of the media's 13 utterly wrong predictions of the Imminent Trump Implosion, at least one, vituperative, foul-mouthed blogger of the Left was busy getting the story right...
As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.
In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.
They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog. This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls off over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...
...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate...
And so once more, having publicly fucked the same story up over and over and over again, the Beltway media must now use its power and reach to manufacture yet another version of the same lie it always tells in when it gets caught with it's ass hanging out.
The lie that Everybody Got It Wrong.
UPDATE:
And sadly right on schedule, the former home of lucid Liberal analysis put up a post literally entitled...
2015: The year everyone was wrong about the GOP race
On "Meet the Press", Matt Bai made a little hay out of one of the many truths which Liberals have been shouting into the Beltway Media Abyss for years.
First, Bush speechwriter and one of the Beltway's many emergency-backup-David Brooks-type persons, Michael Gerson, needed to impotently wring his hands the requisite number of times over the horror that he and has kind have wrought:
ANDREA MITCHELL: Have you ever seen Donald Trump and the Drunk Uncle on Saturday Night Live Weekend Update together? That was a pretty good imitation. But Michael Gerson, to the serious point of the level of invective, I haven't seen this, frankly, since the George Wallace campaign where attacks on the media at rallies really were one of the signature effects.
MICHAEL GERSON: Well, it's important we realize what context this was in. He was praising Vladimir Putin, who is someone who has imprisoned and killed journalists. And this is where we need to make the distinction between the ridiculous and the dangerous.
This is a man now flirting with authoritarianism. Praising the leadership style of Vladimir Putin. So is this a rhetoric? He has extreme policies. And now he's praising a leadership style that really flirts with authoritarianism. This is a serious, serious matter.
Yes, yes. Yet another wingnut casino employee claiming to shocked!shocked! that gambling is etc. We've heard it all before. We fucking get it. You knew nothing about how your Republican Party was growing and harvesting its authoritarian meathead voters all these years.
Nothing.
And that is how you get to play in the NBA, kids!
So having made a show of rending the requisite garment, Andrea Mitchell tees up Mr. Bai:
ANDREA MITCHELL:
But of course it is working and, Matt Bai, you wrote memorably this week why. That we are somewhat to blame. In fact you wrote, "It's clear now that Trump's enduring popularity is in no small part a reflection of an acid disdain for us. This is a simmering reaction to smugness and shallowness in the media, a parade of glib punditry unmoored to any sense of history or personal experience. It's about our love of gaffes and scandals, real or imagined, and our rigid enforcement of the politically correct." Discuss.`
I feel obligate to mention a few things before we move along.
First, Mr. Bai's edgy, critique of the media as pack of callow, soulless Halperins hiding behind the word "journalism" is nothing new. Liberals have been been writing about it since before the dawn of blogging. No one paid us any mind because no one ever pays us any mind.
Second, Mr. Bai's edgy, new critique made it onto teevee because it conspicuously did not mention that result of this "parade of glib punditry unmoored to any sense of history or personal experience" is that our media's political narrative always bends in the Conservative direction. This is because...
Third, the only "politically correct" boundary which the media actually enforces is the iron rule of "Both Siderism".
And now, Mr. Bai:
MATT BAI:
Oh, I've heard some discussion. Look, I've made this point. It's not always popular. We treat presidential politics and politics in general like a reality show and we have for years. I mean if you've been following the media in this campaign we set up NCAA brackets to match the seeds in the campaign. We order up every kind of garbage poll you can find. We literally treat our candidates as contestants on a game show to be voted off or vote on.
And I think there's a cost for that and the cost is that you set up a platform where someone like a Donald Trump can come and exploit it very handily, because he is the perfect reality show candidate. And I think at this point there is this symbiosis with the media and Trump.
I think at this point he has to be covered to the extent that he is because he is clearly leading, late in the campaign in the polls. But there's a long period in this campaign where I think we exaggerated his support because it brought ratings and it brought clicks and it was the great shiny story of the campaign. And I think we did a great disservice to the country.
So, volatile stuff right?
Remember how Mrs. Allan Greenspan introduced Mr. Bai's remarks?
ANDREA MITCHELL: ... Discuss.
This is how Mrs. Allan Greenspan wrapped up Mr. Bai's remarks
ANDREA MITCHELL: Let's leave that here for a moment. We'll be back. And when we come back the war against ISIS...
***COMMERCIAL BREAK***
Because no way, no how will there ever be an honest "discussion" of any of this anywhere in the Beltway media. Doubly so for the "Both Siderist" stuff.
Elsewhere, the Wrongest Man in America and ABC News' resident "brilliant, original thinker", Bill Kristol, continued collecting a sizable paycheck from a major American media company for being a blight on humanity while his colleagues larf it up:
BILL KRISTOL, "THE WEEKLY STANDARD": The Republican primary voters don't like the media. So Trump's wars with the media helped Trump. They don't like the Republican establishment. They don't like the Republican congressional leadership. They've really talked themselves into a -- I mean, I think there's plenty to criticize in both the media and the Republican leadership. But they really -- a certain chunk of Republican primary electorate has talked itself into disliking the Republican establishment as much as -- almost as much as they dislike President Obama or Hillary Clinton.
And Trump has capitalized on that. The question is is that 25 percent of the Republican primary electorate? Is it 35 percent? Could it be 45 percent? And could he be the nominee?
KARL: But you've been predicting his demise for months.
KRISTOL: I have. But I'm sticking with it, you know.
(LAUGHTER)
KRISTOL: What's the point of changing now? I'd look pathetic.
(CROSSTALK)
KRISTOL: If I'm right, I can say I was early. And if I'm wrong... Yes, I won't get any credit for capitulating here in late December.
You now understand just about everything you need to know about the America Neoconservative mindset that not only lied into Bush's Iraqi Debacle with a straight face, but which continues to enjoy an honored place at the Beltway media table where they continue to demand ever more blood and more treasure be poured into into their mad, hegemonic schemes.
KRISTOL: The only Republican Hillary Clinton can beat is Donald Trump.
"Hey, man, you don't talk to the Santa. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a elf-toymaker in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you, and he won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you on his lap, and he'll say do you know that “ant” is the middle word in Santa? If you can know who has been naughty and who as been nice when all about you are getting shitty toys and socks and blaming it on you…if you can trust your elves when all men doubt you -- I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little elf, I'm a little elf, he's, he's The Claus, man. I should have been a bag of remaindered WalMart Barbies being sold out the trunk of an El Dorado on a dead-drunk Sunday Morning on Maxwell Street -- I mean --”
Combining every unpleasant trait of a belligerent Irish drunk except the actual drinking, Matthews explains here that the media just has to cover Trump 24/7 (including his ghastly one-hour Trump infomercial) because everyone else on Earth is boring and creepy.
On the one hand, since his whole schtick is asking "questions" of hapless panelists and then bulldozing and bombasting right over their answers until they find a way to squeeze in a craven affirmation of his rightness, Matthews wouldn't recognize a decent interview if it tingled it's way up his leg and bit him on the ass.
On the other hand, his style is perfectly tailored to MSNBC's new business model of aggressively alienating as many Liberals viewers as possible, so I cannot imagine this will change any time soon,
For a long time now, The Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair ™ hasn't just a place for your drunk, Bircher uncle and his gun-humping pals to let their freak flags fly. Oh my no. In fact as recently as three years ago, The Tribe included many of America's richest and most well-respected lunatics as charter members. For example, who can forget back in 2012 when billionaire crank Jack Welch and a whole phalanx of his fellow Conservative donor basket-cases all fell out with near-fatal cases of the flaming fantods because real world arithmetic math was in irreconcilable conflict with the voices in their heads?
Conspiracy World
...
To live and seethe in that world of conspiracy theories means rejecting any form of objective reality. When unemployment numbers make the administration look good, they are obviously “cooked.” When poll numbers put Mr. Obama ahead, they are skewed. Birth certificates are forgeries. Safety-net programs are giveaways to supporters. Health insurance reform is socialism. And campaign donation disclosure is antibusiness.
...
Last week, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8 percent, depriving Mitt Romney of his standard talking point that the rate had never been below 8 percent during Mr. Obama’s term. No one expected Republicans to celebrate a positive trend for the country, but almost immediately the anchors on Fox News and the editors of right-wing Web sites saw something more sinister: a conspiracy, led by the Obama campaign, to manipulate the numbers to make the president look good a month before the election.
The charge was absurd. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which along with the Census Bureau conducts the underlying household survey, is run by career civil servants and is impervious to political pressure and manipulation, as all but the hypnotized in Washington understand. But, this time, the conspiracy theorists went beyond the usual suspects. Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, said Mr. Obama’s Chicago staff obviously changed the numbers, though he had no evidence of chicanery beyond the outrageous charge that the numbers came from an “ideologue division of the federal government.”
To Mr. Welch and his fellow cynics, the facts were inconvenient, so they had to be wrong. And not just wrong, but deliberately so. That’s the same mentality that led ideologues last month to accuse independent pollsters of deliberately skewing polls to show Mr. Obama ahead, though no such charges are emerging now that Mr. Romney is improving in the polls. And this trend is reinforced when people who know better, like Newt Gingrich and Senator John McCain, trash the civil servants at the State Department and the Congressional Budget Office. (Mr. Romney, to his credit, did not question the latest jobless figures.)
Democrats aren’t happy about the latest polls, but they aren’t suggesting Mr. Romney is manipulating them, just as they didn’t undermine the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the jobless numbers were high. Many are far more worried about a conspiracy that is verifiable and serious: the concerted effort by Republicans over the last four years to deprive minorities, poor people and other likely Democratic supporters of their voting rights.
That, of course, doesn’t seem to bother those who see “Chicago’s” evil hand everywhere. When there is real-world evidence of political collusion, the conspiracy theorists are nowhere to be found.
...
Good times!
But now things have changed, and the "drunk, Bircher uncle and his gun-humping pals" members of The Tribe have decided they're done with arranged marriages to Wall Street Conservative cyborgs. Instead, they've starting slutting around with a fast-talking, Big City real estate mogul of who Daddy Donor definitely does not approve, but who knows how to make their batshit ganglia twitch. Which is why billionaire-American and life-long underwriter of crackpot wingnut schemes, T. Boone Pickens, feels that Daddy Donor needs to step in to put a stop to all of this wild, shameless, footloosery and instead install some kinda "bipartisan panel" which would screen out the unmanageable, large-bore loons so that the best possible smaller-bore, Pickens-acceptable loons end up running for president:
T. Boone Pickens calls for bipartisan panel to screen candidates for president
BP Capital founder T. Boone Pickens, a billionaire Republican donor, is calling for a bipartisan panel to determine who can run for president.
According to the Library of Congress, the only stipulations for running for president include being a natural born citizen, a resident of 14 years and at least 35 years old. Such limited standards allow political outsiders like Republican front-runner Donald Trump to run for president — and Pickens thinks they're not stringent enough.
“My big idea for 2016 is to put together a bipartisan screening committee that vets presidential candidates like we do anyone else applying for a job and recommends the best candidates possible,” Pickens wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. “We have people running for president now who don’t even have experience running a lemonade stand.”
Pickens, who donated to Jeb Bush early on before flirting with Ben Carson, said the committee should factor in leadership experience, team-building skills and plans for prospective candidates’ administration.
“Right now we have a process that emphasizes accusation and innuendo,” Pickens said, alluding to the incessant brawls among Republican primary contenders. “Fact-checking is done … after the fact. And just like reality TV, there is too much of an emphasis on the inconsequential and the irrelevant. Such a vetting process could alleviate much of that.”...
The fact that I have no doubt that ol' T. Boone sincerely believes this and that no one around him had the huevos to tell him that he sounds like a dribbling halfwit is what makes it awesome.
So there you are, a lifelong member of the Conservative Elite. Loyal writer of speeches and tanker of thinks, who has logged enough hours trashing Liberals and prostrating yourself at St. Ronald Reagan's reliquary of terrible ideas that you have become a minor but fixed point in the Wingnut Welfare firmament.
And now that you have tilled the Conservative soil under the blazing LED screen and planted and fertilized and watered and weeded your fields with care -- now that you have lived to see what you have help grow from tiny seedlings of hate and paranoia into something so tall and strong that it blots out the sun...
...you run from your creation as fast as your little legs can carry you.
As a former Dubya speechwriter and author of such books as The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush and An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (with the monstrous Richard Perle) Mr. David Frum is well-positioned to write a long article for The Atlantic (where he is now employed as a Senior Editor, because that is how the world works) about how fucked up the Republican party is...
...without any unpleasant or inconvenient references as to how it got that way.
Mr. Frum's article gives the reader a decent snapshot of what is happening right now inside moldering corpse of the Party of Lincoln, but it is also carefully calculated to leave the impression that the GOP just wandered in from out of town sometime around 2009, fully formed and neatly bisected between a hapless, out-of-touch donor class --
Yet even as the Republican Main Street protested Obamacare, it rejected the hardening ideological orthodoxy of Republican donors and elected officials. A substantial minority of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome “heavy” taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21 percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17 percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to Pew. Less than a third of ordinary Republicans supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants (again according to Pew); a majority, by contrast, favored stepped-up deportation.
As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.
-- and just-plain-white-folks who have grown intractably bitter and cynical for some reason.
Christ on a flaming hover board, Mr. Frum, of course the Conservative Brain Caste thought they could tell the party base how to hate and who to vote for. Who do you think invested 30 years and untold billions of dollars to manufacture that malleable, ignorant, bigoted cesspit of humanity in the first place, Mr. Frum? Where do you think the money was coming from all those years you were drawing a salary from Bloody Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Frum? Who do you think invented the fucking Tea Party out of thin air so the Republican base could have a safe space in which to burn their Bush/Cheney '04 lawn signs and learn to pretend they had never even heard of the GOP, Mr. Frum?
The most darkly hilarious part of this whole farce is that you could open almost any vituperative, foul-mouthed, America-hating, terrorist-loving Liberal blog from almost any point dating back to the dawn of blogging and find us pointing out the Gigantic And Blinding Obvious Thing which Mr. Frum and the rest of his ilk are still struggling mightily to ignore (from remarks I made in the comment section of the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog more than ten years ago, and which Mr. Gilliard saw fit to haul up to his front page):
Monday, March 28, 2005
They are serious
Driftglass posted this in comments and it's too damn funny to stay there.
IMHO it’s as simple as: “Never jump into bed with someone who’s crazier than you are.”
For the Suburban Gated, the non-deranged gunnies and the Tax Cuts Uber Alles Republicans, it’s all jolly good fun having a romp with the Fundies…as long as they keep delivering the 20% margin the GOP must have to win anything and as long as they stay the fuck away from my house and family, its all just good kinky fun…
…until the sun comes up, and you realize that the Electoral Candy you were offered was just bait to get you into the Windowless Fundy Panel Truck. Oops.
And now you’re waaaay out in the country somewhere you don’t recognize without your pants, and you start to figure our that all the Burning Crosses and Swastikas and Apocalyptic Paraphernalia that tricks out the inside of the van isn't tatted-up Goth Chick posturing.
And Randall Terry and Tom DeLay wave to you from the front seat and say, “Mornin’ shug! Get ready; we gonna burn us some ‘a them Chirst Hatin’ Abortionists today.” Or Fags. Or Negros. Or Liberals. Or Ay-rabs. Or Jews. Or, really, Anybody.
And all of the slack-jawed yokels who were so eagerly helpful while you were passing you’re Lovely Tax Cuts are sitting around you giggling…and armed to their snaggled teeth.
And then you hear, “Bring Out The Gimp.” (Which, for my money, should be the Democrats’ Lead Media Message for the next four months.)
Oh. God. You mean these crazy fucks were serious? Like, really, really serious?!
No shit they’re serious, Suburban Weekend Bad-Ass -- and it's not exactly like you weren't given Ample Warning: Now they have your shriveled nuts in a razor-lined C-clamp, they want the very high interest vig on the Electoral Loan they made you to pay for your Optional War and Drunken Safety Net Shredding Good Times.
As I've been saying, the devil wants his due, and he's come to collect.
They thought they could play them forever. I guess forever is today.
But how can this be happening? After all, the antiestablishment candidates now dominating the field, aside from being deeply ignorant about policy, have a habit of making false claims, then refusing to acknowledge error. Why don’t Republican voters seem to care?
Well, part of the answer has to be that the party taught them not to care. Bluster and belligerence as substitutes for analysis, disdain for any kind of measured response, dismissal of inconvenient facts reported by the “liberal media” didn’t suddenly arrive on the Republican scene last summer. On the contrary, they have long been key elements of the party brand. So how are voters supposed to know where to draw the line?
Conservative columnist and Palinite-hateswarm-survivor, Kathleen Parker, is upset at how some people conduct themselves as Murricans.
Unfortunately for her readers, for some reason she never quite gets around to identifying who these people are exactly. Perhaps, as a public service, someone could piece together the clues she left behind could suss out what specific group of people Ms. Parker might be referring to when she says...
...many Americans still need to be reminded that Muslims, rather than our enemies, are our friends...
None too soon, we’re beginning to hear reasonable voices rise above the din of nationalistic jargon from some of our lesser, if glaring, lights.
One such voice belongs to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)...
Thus, demonizing or marginalizing Muslims leads not to greater safety but to greater numbers of recruits...
It is also rude and un-American.
We seem to have no trouble demanding that moderate Muslims condemn the radicals, but we’re less than impressive when it comes to moderate Americans taking a stand against our own extremists...
Having skillfully avoided mentioning the fact that the "extremists" she is so worried about are the clear majority in her Republican Party, Ms. Parker turns to the problem of taking action. Who will stand up to these rude-yet-nameless individuals?
The faith-based community does what it can, but despite Fox News' policy of giving any number of wingnut snake-handlers and end-times goofs unlimited access to America's airwaves, somehow the message of interfaith goodwill "does not reach deeply enough into the secular community to have much effect":
Our failure to communicate with one another can lead only to the sort of frenzied embrace of isolationism and marginalization we’ve witnessed of late. And though interfaith ministries often meet for these purposes, their message does not reach deeply enough into the secular community to have much effect.
Actually, Ms. Parker, your Republican party has not suffered from a failure to communicate in the slightest. In fact, they've spent many decades and billions of dollars building a vast and powerful media/political/religious machine for the expressed purpose of communicating their beliefs and intentions with absolute clarity, and then enacting those belief and intentions via the political process.
Or hadn't you noticed?
Ms. Parker also believes that the President has let us all down by not calling Murricans to action --
...I had hoped the president might call on Americans to do their part and issue a call to specific action...
-- forgetting, apparently, that if the Kenyan Usurper came out in favor of springtime and Baby Jebus, members of her Republican party would rise as one to denounce it, filibuster it, hold 75 consecutive votes to repeal it and begin immediately worshiping Odin out of spite.
This is the point at which Ms. Parker simply runs out of Big Ideas and begins casting around for stuff that other people might have have tried that has worked in other contexts:
There are already several models available for replication. The “Welcome Table” created by the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation has been extremely successful in healing the wounds of the civil rights era...
The Village Square, begun several years ago in Tallahassee, and now in a few other cities, brings citizens together to a bipartisan, formal debate on issues crucial to the community...
Actually, Ms. Parker, we are already engaged in a bipartisan debate on issues crucial to the community.
It's called an "election".
In fact, in some ways it's kind of a perfect election, because just like in the formal debates which take place in high schools all over this country, the sides are so clearly and cleanly divided on so many issues. For example, one side believes the world is a complex place and that we should put a premium on diplomacy, tolerance and evidence while the other side believes that Barack Obama is secretly in league with terrorists, science is a Librul scam, people are poor because they want to be, all worldly problems can be solved by tax cuts and deregulation and we should bomb the fuck out of an entirely fictional country just to be on the safe side.
Weird how someone who writes about politics for a living does not understand this.
Weirder still how someone who claims to be a journalist cannot bear to mention the blindingly obvious fact that almost all serious problem with our country are the result of her Republican party being packed to the rafters with vicious, ignorant, paranoid assholes.
The latest addition to the Great Franchise -- Star Wars: The Force Awakens -- beat everything in sight by echoing and supersizing everything you liked about the original.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens beat every box office record
In the end, even the dinosaurs were no match for a universe far, far away.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is officially a record-breaking hit, raking in at least $247 million in its opening weekend. To put that in perspective, The Force Awakens crushed Jurassic World's record-breaking $208.8 million opening weekend from this summer, and set a December opening record by tripling The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey's December 2012 opening of $84.6 million, according to Variety...
Trump has "perfected the outrageous untruth as a campaign tool," said Michael LaBossiere, a philosophy professor at Florida A&M University who studies theories of knowledge. "He makes a clearly false or even absurdly false claim, which draws the attention of the media. He then rides that wave until it comes time to call up another one."
PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked. No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial.
In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump’s -- his various statements also led our Readers’ Poll. But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy...
You might recall that way back in June, while all the Beltway's most respectable Very Serious People were have a good ol' respectable larf over the sudden-but-nothing-to-worry-about ascendancy of The-Breitbart-Comment-Section-That-Walks-Like-A-Man, down in democracy's steerage section, a few of America's remaining disreputable, vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left were taking Mr. Trump very seriously:
...
In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.
But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump.
As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.
In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.
They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog. This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...
...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.
Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.
And ever since, the Fight on the Right has gone exactly where I predicted it would go -- a knife fight atop Wingnut Olympus over who will get control over Conservatism's greatest and most toxic asset: those millions and millions of paranoid, hate-fed chumps upon whose shoulders rests the fate and fortunes of the oligarchs and fascists at the top.
CHUCK TODD: ...and my pal, radio talk show host, Hugh Hewitt, who, of course, has been the must-do for every presidential contender...
Click.
Alrighty then, let's see if the nostalgia stations are running any decent Addam's Family reruns instead:
Later, I combed through the transcribed wreckage of this once-proud American civic institution and found the source of the problem which brought the once-mighty "Meet the Press" to it's knees:
HUGH HEWITT: I think it's kind of helping Chris Christie, because if you see the new movie "Creed," Creed goes at the English fighter again and again, so Rubio and Cruz are killing each other and Chris Christie is standing over there, is the Rocky-- Stallone character who is winning by not being in the fight...
And
HUGH HEWITT: ...Mark Levin is one of my very closest friends, I read The Liberty Amendments and Ameritopia, but I think he's wrong. Paul Ryan is a new man who is beginning a turnaround, a workout, a difficult situation for the Republican Party. And like Cruz and Rubio, is young, energetic, full of ideas. So this fight can go on a long time, we're winning...
And
HUGH HEWITT: And they're coming together. I clapped when Donald Trump said he is going to stay--
CHUCK TODD: You had no regrets on the clap?
HUGH HEWITT: No regrets-- It means that there will not be the third party that the professor referred to that would destroy the Republican Party. No regrets whatsoever--
And
HUGH HEWITT: ...This is the second time that Hillary has created a video narrative that is a lie and that will become the story through the Christmas dinner debate. So I think Trump can beat her. I think Ted Cruz can beat her. Chris Christie can crush her, I think Marco Rubio--
CHUCK TODD: You think Donald Trump can beat Hillary Clinton?
HUGH HEWITT: You know, she has a 60 percent untrustworthy number
CHUCK TODD: Did you hear his percentage?
HUGH HEWITT: But 60 percent untrustworthy number--
CHUCK TODD: And Donald Trump I believe has the same number.
JOSE DIAZ-BALART: Seventy-one percent...
In case you were wondering how on earth freaks like Hugh Hewitt get jumped to the front of the Respected Pundit/Chuck Todd BFF queue, Media Matters offers a few clues:
Media Highlight How GOP "Carping" Secured Hugh Hewitt's CNN Debate Moderator Gig
Media outlets have called out CNN for selecting conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt as a moderator of the December 15 Republican primary debate, noting that the inclusion of this "highly [...] partisan" conservative media figure is the result of Republican Party "carping." The Republican National Committee (RNC) has pressured networks to include conservative media figures as debate moderators, a move received with criticism from former debate moderators and network executives.
Meanwhile, just down the dial, Matthew "I'm an Independent except for that time I ran George Bush's 2004 campaign" Dowd was serving up some Sunday Morning Both Siderist stew just the way his Beltway colleagues like it: congealed, tepid and thrown together from 1992 leftovers:
DOWD: I actually don't think he's too far to win the general election. In the course of America today, what we've seen in the course of these debates is there's no conservatives left in the Democratic Party at all, and there's no liberals left in the Republican Party at all. They've both bombed to the polarized ends of the spectrum.
The Republican midterm sweep delivered the coup de grâce to the liberal fantasy by dramatically foreshortening what many pundits expected to be an enduring Democratic majority. But it also dropped a lid, at least temporarily, on the conservative freakout. (It’s hard to fret that much about the supposed Kenyan-Marxist radical in the White House when anything he accomplishes has to be co-signed by John Boehner)
...
This return to normalcy is good news for fans of bipartisan comity and centrism for centrism’s sake. And it might be good news for the country. In the end, some sort of bipartisanship will be required to pull America back from the fiscal precipice, and the productivity of this lame-duck December shows that cooperation between the two parties isn’t as impossible as it seemed just a few months ago.
But when it comes to the hard challenges ahead, comity won’t be enough. Real courage is required as well. And this month’s outbreak of bipartisanship was conspicuously yellow-bellied. Republicans and Democrats came together to cut taxes, raise spending, and give free health care to the first responders on 9/11. They indulged, in other words, in the kind of easy, profligate “moderation” that’s done as much damage to the country over the years as the ideologies of either left or right.
...
Because sometimes you have to look back to realize just how cartoonishly fucked-in-the-head our media has become,
Guests: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla
Panel: Democratic strategist David Axelrod, Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal, Dan Balz of The Washington Post and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.
"This Week" (ABC):
Guests: Donald Trump, Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Hillary Clinton.
Panel: Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd, Republican strategist Ana Navarro and ABC News' Cokie Roberts.
"Meet the Press" (NBC):
Guests: House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Sen. Bernie Sanders and John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Panel: José Díaz-Balart of MSNBC and Telemundo, presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times and radio host Hugh Hewitt.
"Fox News Sunday": Who the hell cares.
"State of the Union" (CNN) scored that elusive Rick Perry interview.
"Fareed Zakaria GPS" (CNN) will feature Jon Meacham pimping his biography of Poppy Bush.
"Sunday Morning Futures" (Another Fox News cartoon)
Guests: Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., Microsoft COO Kevin Turner and Marvin Kalb, former diplomatic correspondent at CBS and NBC News.
Panel: GOP strategist Ed Rollins, "journalist" Judith Miller and radio host Alan Colmes.
"MediaBuzz" (Yet another Fox News cartoon) will have Supreme Leader Snoke Donald Trump presumably beamed in by hologram.
