Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Television: A medium. So called because it's neither rare nor well done." 

-- Ernie Kovacs

On Sunday's "Meet the Press",  (he said, jumping right in) President Stupid's EPA Defenestrator, Scott Pruitt, amused me by taking his new favorite word out for a walk.

And that word is "Chuck".

EPA ADMINISTRATOR SCOTT PRUITT: Chuck, good morning.

PRUITT: Engagement internationally on these issues, Chuck, is very very important.

PRUITT:  ...But he also said Chuck, that engagement and discussion...

PRUITT:   And Chuck what's important here is that we are at pre-1994 levels...

PRUITT:  I think the rest of the world applauded what we did in Paris. And we have to go back, we have to go back Chuck.

PRUITT: Because it put us at an economic disadvantage, but I think also Chuck…

PRUITT: But Chuck, here's the deal.

PRUITT:  The reason they said those things Chuck, is because the rest of the world...

PRUITT:  You have to have fuel diversity, Chuck, because if we go to a all renewables...

PRUITT:  It's also key by the way Chuck , to keeping cost low.

PRUITT: And, Chuck, I think what's being missed in all of this.

PRUITT: It was not a political decision. It was a right for this country, Chuck.

PRUITT: Thanks, Chuck.

Of course Pruitt also just troweled out the climate denial and "Paris is a global conspiracy to destroy America's vital coal, buggy whip and Precious Bodily Fluids sectors!" bullshit -- tuck-pointed the studio with it, floor-to-ceiling -- loudly and indignantly.  But that's what we expect from the mob of thieves and demagogue into who's tender embrace the GOP delivered the country, right?  And this two-bit real estate hustler's verbal tic of repeating the chump's name over and over again was such a big, dumb foot-stomp in the middle of all that lying that it would not surprise if President Stupid had Scott in for a Trump University "How To Pitch The Rubes" seminar before he went on-camera.

If you go seeking knowledge about the state of the American nation and the soul of the American people, the Gasbag Cavalcade is last the place you will find it.  Better you should spend an hour watching the latest episode of American Gods and its take on gun worship 

'American Gods' Statement On America's Gun Obsession Takes No Prisoners

-- and immigration --

Jesus Is An Illegal Immigrant On 'American Gods,' Challenging The Religious Right

-- than trying to glean any wisdom from the all Hot Takes and Round Tables and Power Panels that clog up the teevee on any given Sunday.

So since honesty and integrity went out the window of the media Mouse Circus years ago without so much as a gardyloo, there is no basis for judging it other than its sheer, stomach-lurching entertainment value.  

And for me, the main entertainment was watching Hugh Hewitt -- who, as we all know, is a cyborg sent from the future to destroy America -- begin to enter the robot equivalent of full-blown dementia.

First comes the Parsing of the Tweets.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes. I thinks he's actually raising the ante in terms of getting the court to move more quickly on its disposition. He is fairly confident as I am that the Fourth Circuit decision is wrong. However, the first tweet is the tweet I like...

And then Hewitt began to mount the most despicable argument proffered by any Conservative on any non-Fox show this weekend.  Straight out of the Bush/Cheney playbook.

That argument that the Left had a civic duty to bow to the madness President Stupid and the Right because:

HUGH HEWITT: Well I'm not skeptical of climate change, and I thought Secretary Kerry was perfectly contemptuous of conservatives and rule-of-law conservatives especially... 

HUGH HEWITT: You can never get to consensus via contempt...

(That was Hewitt reaching into his skull on live teevee and yanking out the chip set that allows him to remember his party's eight years of relentless, paranoid and often openly racist contempt and sabotage to which his party subjected President Obama.)

And why is "consensus" suddenly so fucking important to Hewitt?

Because -- are you ready? -- you are either be on the side of honestly critiquing the Right as the brainwashed wasteland of bigots and imbeciles that it self-evidently is...or you are on the side of defeating terrorists.

No kidding. To serve his mad king, esteemed NBC Employee and infamous hate radio crackpot actually went all the way back to the poisonous "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists" well.

HEWITT: ... This country cannot effectively prosecute the war on terror if half the discussions begin with contempt of conservatives and people who have a different point of view... 

Which, really, what do you expect?  After all, this is a cyborg sent from the future to destroy America, so the entertaining part was watching the him fry his own circuits trying to cobble together human words to defend his indefensible nonsense.

HUGH HEWITT: You can never get to consensus via contempt. 75 years ago this week was the Battle of Midway. It's a turning point. I want to connect the two stories. This country cannot effectively prosecute the war on terror if half the discussions begin with contempt of conservatives and people who have a different point of view. At the end of the second battle of El Alamein, Churchill said, "This is not the beginning of the end, but it's the end of the beginning." We have to get to a beginning--

HEATHER MCGHEE: --talking about the planet right now and the future--

CHUCK TODD: All right.

HUGH HEWITT: Because that's--

STEPHANIE CUTTER: But conservatives disagree with what Donald Trump did.

CHUCK TODD: I'm going to pause it here...

Good idea, Chuck.  Because it sure as shit seemed like your man Hugh was about to blow apart at the rivets like Robot Richard Simmons:

And speaking of mechanical men who lapse hilariously into Hofstadter-Moebius loops --

In the novels of Arthur C. Clarke, an error condition common to advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs, such as HAL 9000. (Presumably named after Professor Douglas Hofstadter.) It can occur when the computer is given a directive in conflict with its basic design principles, and is unable to resolve the conflict. The symptoms are very similar to a schizophrenic psychosis in humans.

-- here is former Bush speechwriter, Michael Gerson, trying to answer a simple question while at the same time peering into the depths of the perdition into which he will surely be cast for helping to create the Hellbeast Party that is now stomping the shit out of our country:

So what was it that put the whammy on Hugh Hewitt?

Well once again, the answer to almost all of life's vexing questions about how to defeat seemingly-implacable automatons can be found in the teachings of James T. Kirk.  In this case, two other panelists -- Heather McGhee and Stephanie Cutter -- relentlessly cross-talked Hewitt into going "near-Norman", as we say in the trade.

Here is a delightful sample:

...
STEPHANIE CUTTER: Well actually that's what I was going to address to Hugh's comment, that you mentioned that Kerry was dismissive to rule of law conservatives. Well, there are a lot of rule of law conservatives who didn't want to get out of the Paris Agreement. You're making a process argument, you don't like the way we got into it so you're taking us out of it. That argument doesn't hold up so why penalize--

HUGH HEWITT: Stephanie--

STEPHANIE CUTTER: --the country?

HUGH HEWITT: --the Constitution is never--

STEPHANIE CUTTER: Even if you don't like--

HUGH HEWITT:--a process argument.

STEPHANIE CUTTER: Even if you don't--

HUGH HEWITT: The Constitution is a fundamental deal.

STEPHANIE CUTTER: But, Hugh, you're penalizing the country because of that argument.

HUGH HEWITT: But let me--

STEPHANIE CUTTER: And wait. I'm not done. I'm not done--

STEPHANIE CUTTER: As a result, there are--

HEATHER MCGHEE: --entertain it.

STEPHANIE CUTTER: --mayors, and governors, and heads of major manufacturers, and oil companies, many of whom are Republicans, who want to stay in the agreement because they see what it means for our economy and for our competitiveness--

HUGH HEWITT: I get that. But the argument that needs to be made--

STEPHANIE CUTTER: And that is what--

HUGH HEWITT: --has to be a consensus builder.

STEPHANIE CUTTER: That's what Al Gore is getting that, is that this is going to happen anyway. The country is going to continue to move forward in developing the technologies and meeting our targets regardless of what Donald Trump--

HUGH HEWITT: You can--

STEPHANIE CUTTER: --does and says.

HUGH HEWITT: You can never--

STEPHANIE CUTTER: He's abdicated his leadership, but we have not abdicated America's leadership...

And on that note: