Danger UXB

It seems that a small and selective percentage of the tons of unexploded ordnance left over from the 1990s are now being dug up and detonated here in 2017.

And various longtime pundits for whom loathing of the Clintons was always the very best career butter are finding that dusting off their old IBM Selectrics and banging out 800 words of copy on Bill "History's Greatest Villain" Clinton and Hillary "History's Other Greatest Villain" Clinton to once again be a rewarding and profitable enterprise.

A sampling.

Ross Cardinal Douthat:

What if Ken Starr Was Right?

Maureen Dowd:

The Hillary Effect

Andrew Sullivan:

But evangelical Republicans are not, of course, the only group susceptible to such corruption. Democrats are human as well, as we have so abundantly discovered. Many of them have also made their political struggle into a secular form of religion, and found myriad ways to defend the indefensible because the cause demanded it. I vividly remember Gloria Steinem’s op-ed defending Bill Clinton’s sex abuse at the time...

Many giddy, Jebus-lovin' meatbags have even taken to Twitter to demand that statues of Bill Clinton come down because adultery is definitely as bad or worse than sedition, secession and five years of bloody civil war in the name of preserving slavery.

Definitely.

But getting back to the men and women of our elite Beltway punditocracy who get paid to have opinions in public, I am not surprised in the least that Mr. Andrew Sullivan (for example) vividly remembers a Gloria Steinem op-ed from 20 years ago, because the 1990s is where these people all still live:

These were the high-cotton days of the Elite Pundiocracy -- relative peace, relative prosperity, the GOP giving itself over body and soul to Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, and a relatively popular, intelligent, charming anddeeply flawed triangulator-in-chief named Bill Clinton to beat on like a pinata with one faked-up scandal after another.  Then thrown in a special persecutor named Ken Starr who leaked like colander full of tomato soup, with an unlimited budget and a mandate from his GOP handlers to find anything which could be used to destroy the Clinton Administration and it's a three-year Tantric pundit orgasm the likes of which they haven't come close to having since.  

Which is why -- as I pointed out more than a decade ago -- the Pundiocracy and the GOP all got stuck there.  They all came down with a fatal case of collective Meme-nto: the inability to form any new political memories after 1997 -- 

-- and I am left asking the same question now that I asked all the way back then:

Why has the Fourth Estate – right before our eyes -- become a bunch of cowardly Fifth Columnists?

Why, when confronted with clear and overwhelming proof of their complicity and gutlessness -- when asked the simple question “Why?” -- do they go all squirmy and twitchy and outraged?

Why do Conservatives get to stand on desks with their hair on fire and shriek the most ludicrous, vile and mendacious hogwhiz – year after year after year after year after motherfucking year -- unchallenged? Why do these same howler monkeys -– who have been not just wrong but spectacularly, catastrophically wrong about everything, every time -- keep getting invited back in front of the cameras and onto the pages of major newspapers?

And when they rise from their crypts yet again to spackle yet another layer of Conservative lies on the wounded world – to send another wave of our kids off to die for no good reason, circle the wagons around another corporate monster, piss another precious pint of what’s left of our nation’s good name down the sewer, tax-cut-and-spend us further into debt – why do the same “journalists” who were ever eager to carve another slice out of Clinton’s ass over trivia, now piss themselves in like puppies in a thunderstorm and hide under the bed as Conservatives rape the truth two feet in front of them and them rub their noses in it?

But here's the deal.

For all of that -- in fact because of all of that -- I am absolutely up for re-litigating the past.

I'm all in, baby!

But if we're going to re-litigate the past 20 years, we're going to re-litigate all of it.  Every corner of it.  Every president.  Every political party.  Every media outlet.

All of it.

So let the war crimes trials of the Bush Administration commence.

And let the Caucus Room conspirators be dragged into the light for a much-too-long-delay ass-whippin'.

On Meet the Press every week, let Mr. David Brooks answer for all the shit he has been slinging for the last 20 years, and this time the prosecutor will not accept "I don't think I ever wrote those things" as an answer.

Let us firmly resolve to shove all the reprogrammable "independent" meatbags through the Bush Off Machine backwards and let them be tried in the public dock for all they said and did before they burned their Bush/Cheney lawn signs, put on their funny hats and swore they'd never heard of George W. Bush.  And let every "journalist" who let them get away with it stand in the dock with them.

And let us put these patriots under a microscope and find out just exactly how they got this fucked-in-the-head:

Trump voter panelist: "If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him, 'Hold on a second. I need to check with the President if it's true.'" pic.twitter.com/4f8bXkXzhY

— New Day (@NewDay) November 20, 2017

In this matter I am as one with Bethesda 1971 over at Daily Kos:

Let the Retroactive Reckonings Begin!

Because the pundits and political hacks who now want to haul their highly redacted memories of Bill Clinton circa 1998 into the spotlight are the same pundits and political hacks who have made a positive fetish out of what one wag once called "Strategic Forgettery".   And now is as good a time as any to make them pay the price for it.

So go ahead, lets unearth all of that which has been buried and is now hammering away beneath the nation's floorboards like the Tell-Tale Heart.

But I warn you, you may not like what you find:

Behold, a Tip Jar!