Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Destination Loon" Edition.

I spent the morning in the happy company of decent men, ancient Vulcan stoves, a long-dead Blakeslee mixer made in the U S of A during the Johnson Administration out of (apparently) neutronium, and 1001 other accouterments of a battle-hardened church kitchen.

We were feeding people.  It was rewarding.

So I missed most of the Sunday shows as they were unfurling their foul banners across the land and instead picked them up for the most part in reruns and in bits and pieces on as they swarmed together to form a continuous loop in the political noosphere.

Apparently the topic on every single show in America was a guy name Donald J. Trump and the allocation of blame for his existence.

Johnny-on-the-spot with the Both Siderist splooge rag on ABC was everybody's third favorite political invertebrate, Matthew Dowd, dishing out blame to...

...Both Sides!

Quelle surprise

DOWD: -- I have to say, the protesters in this instance, in Chicago and maybe in going forward have done no good service in the course of this. They have done nothing to heal the country in a manner which they say they want to do.  I -- they come in; they act in a very disruptive, violent way. It doesn’t help people that want to defend the First Amendment. Donald Trump has said some outrageous things.

But in that instance, in that time, the protesters, I think, were -- did nothing --

(CROSSTALK)

BRAZILE: And non-violent protesters -- they --

(CROSSTALK)

BRAZILE: Look, Matt, you know, you're throwing your hands at me, be cool.

(LAUGHTER)

BRAZILE: I mean, I'm not the other -- I'm not the --

(CROSSTALK)

BRAZILE: -- no, many of them are non-violent protesters. They're coming at that Muslim woman, who stood there in silence, OK?  They're coming there with their First Amendment rights as well.  But I don't condone violence of any -- I’m a Martin Luther King type. I don't condone the kind of violence. But I do believe that people are reacting to the language and the vitriol from Donald Trump. That's what's happening --

RAMOS: In Chicago, 20 percent of Latinos, don’t you think that they are responding to Donald Trump, saying, you know, we don't want at all what you're saying?

DOWD: But I don’t think -- it's never, I think, good if you say we need to heal the country, we need to unify --

And that is is the place where the Beltway media's corruption and complicity has inevitable led it: crushed between the irresistible force of the now-overt insanity of the Right and the immovable object of wingnut catechism which dictates that at no time will any Conservative ever be required to take any responsibility for any of the horrifying things they routinely say and do.

Which leaves the Beltway media and Republican politicians whose engines are running on nothing but the fumes of the establishment's approval with nothing to do but squeak out increasingly ludicrous communiques about the failure of Both Sides to yadda yadda yadda...

Not so very different from any of the other amoral scumbags on the Right desperately scrambling to hang the blame for their party's descent into fascism on anyone but themselves.

From the WaPo:

Rubio: ‘There is no doubt’ Obama helped stoke recent political chaos

From the New York Times:

Mr. Cruz also suggested that President Obama had stoked tensions since taking office, arguing that the president had “sought to divide us on racial lines, on ethnic lines, on religious lines, on class lines” in moments of crisis.

Later in the same American Broadcasting Company broadcast we learn that Bloody Bill Kristol is still being paid to bring his inerrant "Glorious Victory In Iraq and We'll Be Out By Christmas" predictive skillz to the political arena:

KRISTOL: Yes, I think a Kasich victory in Ohio is a must-win and then holding Trump's margins down or maybe beating him in Missouri, Illinois, where the delegates will split, is important. If Rubio could win in Florida, I would be pretty confident that Trump would not be the Republican nominee. If Ohio and Florida split, I think there's a pretty good chance to stop Trump.

Yes, I agree, people are being much too fatalistic. Because everyone is saying, oh, it's -- everyone says, Donald Trump is a menace to the country. Donald Trump has stigmatized minorities, he's been horrible in his rhetoric in a million different ways.

But 45 percent of the delegates are -- are selected, so let's pre -- let's proclaim it over.

I object to that. If he's a serious menace to the country, people need to fight him to the end...

KRISTOL: It's not inevitable -- Donald Trump has gotten, on average, 35 percent of the vote so far. It is not inevitable that Donald Trump wins winner take all Arizona, that he wins winner take all Wisconsin...

Over on "Meet the Press" Donald J. Trump had himself a fine old time playing handball with Chuck Todd's yam sacks:

CHUCK TODD: Okay. I want to ask you about the moment yesterday in Dayton. Looked like a scary moment, being rushed the stage. I want to ask you. You said it was -- you praised the secret service, but then you said the man had ties to ISIS, that turned out to be a hoax. Did you go over the top there on that? Where did you get that--

DONALD TRUMP:  No, no, no, no. He was, if you look on the internet, if you look at clips --

CHUCK TODD:  Well, it turned out to be a hoax.

DONALD TRUMP:  --He was waving an American flag.

CHUCK TODD:  Well, it turned out to be a hoax. Somebody made that up, sir.

DONALD TRUMP:  Excuse me. He had talk. Well, I don't know what they made up. All I can do is play what's there. He was walking, dragging the American flag on the ground. Is that a correct statement? Was that a hoax too? Was he dragging the flag on the ground?

CHUCK TODD:  Well, that I don't--

DONALD TRUMP:  And just dragging it along?

CHUCK TODD:  I'm talking about the ISIS tweet.

DONALD TRUMP:  Well, you didn't see the clip.

CHUCK TODD:  We're playing the clip right now.

DONALD TRUMP: No, excuse me, you didn't see the clip. He was playing Arabic music, he was dragging the flag along the ground, and he had internet chatter with ISIS and about ISIS. So I don't know if he was or not. But all we did was put out what he had on his internet. He's dragging the flag, the American flag, which I respect obviously more than you.

He was dragging the American flag on the ground like it was a piece of garbage, okay? I don't like that. And a lot of people don't like that. And he also had chatter about ISIS, or with ISIS. And you take a look at it. I mean, people are looking at it very seriously now. But you have to check it before you ask the question.

CHUCK TODD:  Well, I-- no, we have checked it. That's my point, sir. There's no ties to ISIS for this man. No law enforcement official. And this video that you linked to appear to be a hoax.

DONALD TRUMP: Okay, look, well, was it a hoax that he's dragging the flag? Was that him? It looked like the same man to me. He was dragging a flag along the ground and he was playing a certain type of music. And supposedly, there was chatter about ISIS. Now, I don't know. What do I know about it? All I know is what's on the internet. And I don't like to see a man dragging the American flag along the ground in a mocking fashion.

Oh Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.

If you had bothered to pay even peripheral attention to the state of the nation in which you live at any point over the last 20 years you would have noticed that the meatheads and bigots who have enlisted in the Trumpshirts make breakfast, lunch and dinner out of lies like this.  They gorge themselves on internet hoaxes, bloody Fox News gobbets and ALL CAPS emails about secret UN plots against them and then they ask for seconds.  And every time their dirty, commie Liberal friends prove that what they're believing this week is sheer bunkum, they grunt out the same alibi -- "Well, yeah, but Both Sides..." -- and then waddle back to the Hate Radio banquet table.

They.  Don't.  Fucking.  Care.  Chuck.

That's the real story.  The story you would rather gnaw your own arm off than cover.

Instead the crowned jewel of the Beltway media Sunday Morning Gasbag Cavalcade offers up wingnut troll and Ted Cruz dogbody. Hugh Hewitt, obsessing over tractor beams:

HUGH HEWITT:  Well, the Trump tractor beam is pretty strong. But Marco Rubio hopes that someone flips it off...

HUGH HEWITT:  ...I was seeing George Schultz in the front row of the Nancy Reagan funeral, perhaps the greatest living American public servant, went ashore at Peleliu, extraordinarily credential. John Kasich is credential, Donald Trump is the tractor beam on the disappointed. But I think this weekend is changing.

And wingnut hack Alex Castellanos bragging about his scanning tunneling microscope superpower to see into the heart of Donald J. Trump:

ALEX CASTELLANOS:  I...No, I don't think so. Because I don't think Trump is a racist. I don't think he has violence in his heart. I've seen first-time candidates get up there, you get up on stage, you're starch, you're having fun, a protester, it works, and you do more of it. And it's all fun and games until one day there's blood on the floor.

Honest to fucking God, what are any of these Beltway pipe-cleaners still doing on my teevee?

Right now, the Both Siderism is as thick as a swarm of flies at a shit convention. Too loud and numerous to count.  So instead, calm your mind and, as a thought experiment, cast your mind back to July of 1969 when, in defiance of the Received Wisdom of the 1950s smart set, man had just walked on the moon.

Or, as the Onion put it, "Holy Shit, Man Walks On Fucking Moon" (Not Safe For Work)

So, when humans finally walked on fucking moon, who did the national media summon to talk about what we were all watching on the teevee?  The cocktail party sages who had snickered at the whole idea of manned spaceflight as pure, comic book idiocy?

Quelle surprisingly no.

Instead, America's broadcast networks held out the Big Chairs for those daring weirdos who had been right all along.  Writers like Arthur Clarke and Bob Heinlein...

...and Ray Bradbury:

Now we jump 47 years ahead, into the here and now.  And the front page of every paper is American is consumed with the news that one of America's two major political parties is in the process of collapsing into madness and self-immolation...just as a large number of Liberals have been predicting for years,

And who do the American broadcast networks hold out the Big Chairs this time?  Those who have been right all along?  Those who have been warning that this day of reckoning was coming all along>

Oh fuck no.

Instead we must have this guy and dozens like him clogging our national political dialogue like so many ischemic stroke brain clots because otherwise the terrorists have won apparently (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars):