Sunday Morning Comin’ Down: Our Birthers Ourselves Edition

So this was the Sunday when Team Rolling Fiasco finally set its own dick on fire so publicly and  resplendently that it benched it's entire lineup of hacks, malformed little robots and anything-for-a-buck trollops and handed the ball to Rudy "The Anal Leakage That Walks Like A Man" Guiliani with only one instruction: get out there and Win One For The Grifter!

And he face-planted. Hard.  And loud.  And over and over again.

Or, as it shall be know in the business henceforth, pulling a Guiliani:

RUDY GIULIANI:  Well, the actions would be even worse if they were actions. Talk and action are two different things...

RUDY GIULIANI:  I said we're talking about things that he was talking about. I don't know how much he was exaggerating, I don't know how much is true...

Somebody send a matron in with a cart for Uncle Rudy, 'cause he broke his brain.

And -- of course and inevitably -- this gibbering hobgoblin stuck the landing with the most predictable Conservative excuse in the history of bullshit excuses.  

C'mon gang, sing it with me!   You all know the words! (emphasis added):

RUDY GIULIANI:  You know, Chuck, the reality is that in both cases, both people have things in their personal lives that maybe if they could redo it, they would do it differently. And the reality is that this is a situation in which neither side should throw stones because both sides have sinned.

And not two minutes later, Principled Teabagger Lunatic Mike Lee ambled along to add that while the GOP should seriously get to work on getting Trump off the ticket the Democrats should also...

C'mon gang, sing it with me!   Second verse, same as the first! (emphasis added):

SEN. MIKE LEE:  No, but there is something that Mr. Giuliani said that I think was significant which is that Hillary Clinton is, in fact, a flawed candidate, a deeply flawed candidate. So flawed, in fact, that I think the Democratic Party ought to be taking steps to replace her with someone else.

Take any Conservative degenerate anywhere in America.  Let them prattle on for more than a minute about the Conservative atrocity du jour twitching and reeking at their feet and they will always, always, always default to the Great Big Both Siderist Lie.

Always.

Golly, I wonder where in the world millions and millions of America's most fucked-in-the-head bigots and imbeciles all picked up exactly the same filthy habit at exactly the same time?

I guess we'll never know.

Also since we're not bound by linear time here, let us skip back and give Mr. Chuck Todd a little respect today -- a tip of the hat for facilitating the complete unspooling of Guiliani on live teevee.

Because it's kind of amazing.

Let's go to the tape!

And while we're taking the long way home, let us pause for a moment to fully appreciate the majestic beauty of Senator Kelly Ayotte (Stealth Ninth Wave Feminist Hero, "Self-Righteous Hypocrite" and "GOP traitor"),  predicting that she will one day have this awesome conversation with her Daughter of Tomorrow:

Kelly Ayotte:  So when the bad orange man said those terrible things about ladies and their private bits I bravely stood up like a fucking hero and said "I cannot support this man!"

But will somehow never have this conversation:

Lil' Ayotte:  But what did you say when the bad orange man attacked John McCain?  And the Khan family?  And that Miss Universe lady?  And called Mexicans "rapists" and "drug dealers"?  And lied all the time about everything, even about shit he had said that was on tape?  And what about putting that gay-hating, Bible-spouting freak on the ticket?

Kelly Ayotte:  Now, honey, there are some words we Ayottes just don't use.

Lil' Ayotte: I learned it from you, Mom.  Also what the fuck was that racist "birther" shit  all about?  You sat still for that too?

Long pause

Kelly Ayotte:  Hey sport, how about some pancakes!

Lil' Ayotte: Fuck pancakes. I'm 22 years old and I can make my own fucking pancakes, so how about you answer my fucking question?

Yeah, I predict a lot of very special  future Mommy/Daughter Hallmark moments in the Ayotte household...

...and the Kellyanne Conway household:

Lil' Conway (tearfully):  He treats me terribly, mom.  He treats everybody terribly,  He's a monster.

Kellyanne Conway:  But you're getting paid, right?  And up-front. It's very important to get the money up-front.

...and the Kayleigh McEnany  household...

...and the Scottie Nell Hughes household...

...and the Stacy Washington household...

...and the Katrina Pierson household and...well, you get the idea.

So Millennial Daughters of Republican America, remember the important lesson being handed down to  you from your elders: if you lie down with dogs, make god damn sure you get up with ducats.

Down in the ABC News drunk-tank, professional Republican gorgon, Mary Matalin, and thrice-cursed, all-occasion Conservative henchman Alex Castellanos were frantically trying to steer GOP Edmund Fitzgerald away from all-encompassing doom despite the fact that the Party of Trump has clearly already "broke deep and took water"

Anger, of course:

MATLIN: ...So here we have -- this is a difference between the parties. We have a Democrat who acts with his intern in the White House and the party rallies around him. We have a Republican nominee who has a private conversation about sex he's not getting and the party abandons him.

And denial, of course:

MATALIN: And he's ending the campaign not really a conservative and he's not a Republican, either...

And Both Siderist bargaining, of course:

CASTELLANOS: Well, I think this tells you a couple things. One is a terrible thing. I can't defend it and do not plan to. But I'm not sure that -- I would have a little different view than Matt because unlike Tiger Woods there are big tidal forces underneath this debate. This election, ultimately, is not about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, both who have huge negatives...

Most tragicomical of all was Centrist bromide extruder, Matthew Dowd, who seems to be slowly figuring out that the phenomenon of Donald J. Trump may well have taken Mr. Dowd's one and only meal ticket -- implacable Both Siderism -- out behind the barn and really and truly shot it in the head.  

And the terrifying specter of losing the his ideological meal ticket has Mr. Dowd very, very put out:

DOWD: I was mentioned a couple of times. First of all, this isn't just words. This isn't boys will be boys. This is somebody celebrating sexual predation, right. And in the 1990s, as Mary just mentioned, the Republicans went out of their way saying that a sexual predator shouldn't be in the White House.

CASTELLANOS: And he was reelected.

DOWD: Wait, wait. I'm not saying. Wait a second. I'm talking about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy. And now in 2016, Republicans are making the argument -- some Republicans are making the argument that it's OK to put a sexual predator back in the White House. At some point...

MATLIN: Big talker. Locker room talker.

DOWD: What did he say? This is what I do. This is what I do.

CASTELLANOS: Well, look, he may say -- he may have said something...

DOWD: So, he's either lying or he does it.

Also, before the moment slips away, I wanted to reiterate my longstanding belief that there is no group of Americans more wildly at odds with the teachings of Christ than our nation's white Evangelical Conservative Christopaths. They really put the "I" in "Pharisee".

And yes, I did coin the term "Christopath",

And speaking of a]things that happened a long time ago, let me end this week's exciting journey through the Sunday Gasbag Cavalcade with this.

Ten years ago, only a bare handful of Liberals like you and me were saying things like this out loud and in public:

...in the Age of Dubya, the GOP has gone stark, raving nuts.

In the Age of Dubya, the Party of God hasn’t just fallen down the rabbit hole, but has positively hurled itself down into darkness with JATO units strapped to their little, webbed feet to help rocket them to the bottom faster.

In the Age of Dubya, rabid weasels like Coulter and Hannity and Falwell speak for the Party and enforce Orthodoxy with a sledgehammer, and however untouchably revered [Willaim] Buckley might have been in Conservative circles a week ago doesn’t matter. He can become just another Swiftboated unperson in the twinkling of an eye because in the Age of Dubya, Truth and Principle have long ago been bound and gagged and duct-taped into a duffle-bag in the trunk of the GOP Deathmobile.

In the Age of Dubya, the only Evil is to speak against the Dear Leader no matter how lunatic and patently ridiculous his lies may be, and the only Good is blind Loyalty to the Dear Leader.

Because in the Age of Dubya, you can either be a Good American, or a Good Republican, but you can no longer be both...

Back then, speaking these things aloud was basically a professional death sentence: with a few notable exceptions, no respectable outfit was ever gonna touch a writer or a speaker who was saying anything like this about George W. Bush or the Republican Party.

Bill Buckley (whose column prompted this post) was already a granite institution with one foot in the grave, so it cost him nothing to begin his Long Farewell by acknowledging the plain and obvious fact that the Iraq War was FUBAR, but for your workaday dirty hippie, this was heresy.  This was high treason,  This was a one-way, Libtard ticket to Coventry, and we knew it and we did it anyway, because however tiny and precarious our individual situations might have been, these were things that desperately needed to be said -- out loud and in public -- no matter that it was against a tidal wave of Very Serious Beltway pundits and Big Thinkers who shunned us, mocked us and ignored us.

How very amazing and hilarious and depressing, then, that ten years later, while we early-truth-adopters are still habitually shunned and mocked and ignored for the unforgivable sin of being right about the Right all along, many of the very Conservative's who were the fucking architects of the disaster we were warning against all along are now the ones who are invited on the teevee to share their Shocking Revelation about the state of the Party of Lincoln with Murrica.

Let's go to the tape! (h/t Karoli at Crooks & Liars):

Or, if videotape bores you, here's the transcript (emphasis added):

STEVE SCHMIDT: And the only question that's still up in the air is how close the Democrats will come to retaking the House Majority. What this exposes, though, is much deeper and it goes to the Republican Party as an institution. This, this candidacy, the magnitude of its disgrace to the country is almost impossible, I think, to articulate. But it has exposed the intellectual rot in the Republican Party. It has exposed at a massive level the hypocrisy, the modern day money changers in the temple like Jerry Falwell Jr. And so, this party, to go forward and to represent a conservative vision for America, has great soul searching to do. And what we've seen and the danger for all of these candidates is over the course of the last year, these, these candidates who have repeatedly put their party ahead of their country, denying what is so obviously clear to anybody who's watching about his complete and total manifest unfitness for this office.

Mr, Chuck Todd thinks  this was a "Pretty powerful statement" coming from Mr. Schmidt.

I think it is endlessly amusing to watch one Conservative after another come out strong for barn fire safety twenty years after they burned the entire farm to the ground.