Today In Both Sides Do It: No End In Sight

Hey, here's a riddle for you.  How was George W. Bush's Iraqi Debacle exactly like Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act?

The answer?

Ha!  Trick question!  They are absolutely, diametrically opposite things that have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

Well, OK, to be completely fair, they are absolutely, diametrically opposite things that have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, everywhere in the known universe except one place.

And what is that one, obviously-deranged place in the known universe where Operation Endless Clusterfuck and Obamacare are virtually indistinguishable from one another?

On cable teevee of course.

Jesus, really?

Yep.

No!

Yes, it's true.

OK, so answer me this, smartass.  On what cable teevee shows could someone possibly get away with telling lies that enormous and ridiculous and now be overrun by packs of wild historians and political scientists and shoe-leather reporters who would tear them to bits with sharp, pointy facts?  The reboot of Jersey Shore?  Archer?  Black Mirror?  Reruns of Dog the Bounty Hunter?  Kim Possible?

First, don't even with Kim Possible.  Second -- and hold on to your crocs because you are not going to believe this -- these sorts of cartoonishly ridiculous lies are trotted out on cable teevee news programs  every single day.  Cable teevee news which attempt to lend credibility to these cartoonishly ridiculous lies by embedding this within these panels of wildly overpaid "journalists" who get paid a king's ransom to sit in semicircles agreeing with each other that Both Sides are terrible and always equally to blame for everything. 

Like this right here.

Here is my quick-and-dirty transcript of the important bits:

Peggy Noonan (At around 2:19):  Well it struck me yesterday as I watched the extraordinary White House meeting with the two empty chairs representing the Democrats who didn't come to the meeting, I just thought...Obamacare!   Was not...successful. The Obamacare reform.  The tax "thing" not success-- or the tax thing a struggle and we'll see how it goes...

Peggy Noonan (Around 3:29):  But I don't think, among many uh uh among many thoughts I suppose on this [ed. you can really see the Percocets and rise-n-shine Bloody Mary kick in here] I don't think we are living in the age where any major piece of legislation will be respected and accepted by The Murrican People unless two parties back it.  End of story.  And he's not there.

Joe Scarborough:  So let's look back...

And you damn well know what's coming next, don't you?

Or course you do.

Joe Scarborough:  So let's look back over the past 30 years.  And look what presidents got right and what presidents got wrong.  

Yadda yadda yadda George H. W. Bush!  So bipartisan it'd make your teeth hurt

Yadda yadda yadda Bill Clinton!  Helluva guy.

Joe Scarborough: You could impeach him on a Friday and go golfing with him on a Saturday...

At which point any honorable referee woulda benched Squint Scarborough for Aggravated Bullshittery.

But there are honorable referees here, are there?  Which is kinda the point.

Imaginary Libtard:  And what happens when one party -- your Republican Party --becomes so Wrath of Khan bugfuck crazy that it would rather let the world burn than give up its single-minded pursuit of destroying the other party with a relentless campaign of slander, obstruction, sedition and sabotage?  In that case,  Peggy, what moral obligation do people in your profession have to report the facts that that story in exactly that way.

Which is why we Libtards are not allowed to sit at tables such as these.

Onward.

Peggy Noonan:  [Bill Clinton] did welfare reform so brilliantly.  He allowed the Republicans to drag him kicking and screaming to that bill.  He tormented them...  and together they signed it and laughed and went on.  That's how you do it.  It's not good that we don't do it that way anymore -- I...I think Mr. Obama gets some responsibility here for how he bullied through Obamacare..

Further evidence that if you want to keep high schoolers from getting drunk and behaving irresponsibly, don't waste their time with "Alcohol is Dynamite". Just show them Peggers hazily reliving the cartoon version of glory days through a cloud of bad decisions three decades thick.

Because kiddies, this really how ol' Peggers "remembers" the Clinton Years.

And the Obama Years.

And whatever may or may not have happened in-between.

Joe Scarborough:  Again as we move forward I want to talk about George W. Bush and Iraq.  Yes he had Democratic votes, but it was his way or the highway and Democrats learned that pretty quickly.  So the Iraq War, when it went badly, was owned by George W. Bush.  [pause for effect]  Barack Obama passed Obamacare...everything... and yes you can blame the Republicans just like Donald Trump can blame the Democrats.  But anybody who knows Washington knows, there's always a deal to be made. 

This is also the answer to a second riddle that is implicit in the first: Why are those panels are routinely packed with compliant has-beens like Mike Barnicle and half-in-the-bag Bush Regime Dead Enders like Peggy Noonan and not historians or political scientists or shoe-leather reporters or just any Liberal anywhere who has a functional long-term memory?

Because everyone on this panel knows they are lying.  Of course they do.  And we know they're lying.  And they know that we know they're lying.  And so forth.  From NYMag:

Every Republican Lie About Passing Obamacare Is True About Repealing It

...

Conservatives made a part of the last sentence — “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” — famous, possibly the most famous line from the entire health-care debate. Conservatives turned that sentence fragment into an emblem for their claim that Obamacare was passed in the dead of night through a secretive, rushed, undemocratic process. They claim this even now. Just today, Andrew Ferguson attacks that he calls “[t]he creepy, authoritarian manner in which the legislation was passed,” and Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel claims, “Senior Democrats crafted ObamaCare in lobbyist-filled backrooms, forgoing hearings, markups, even input from their own colleagues—much less Republicans.”

This is a bizarre description of a bill that spent a year working through Congress, eventually passing numerous committees, two full House majority votes, one Senate supermajority vote and, in fact, many, many, many hearings. While the law did use a budget-reconciliation bill to enact minor fiscal adjustments, a maneuver that Republicans decried as akin to a death blow to the Republic, in fact its major provisions all received 60 votes in the Senate. The bill was evaluated by the independent Congressional Budget Office, and the projected premium levels in the new exchanges turned out to be accurate, and its predictions of overall federal health spending turned out to be too pessimistic, as the federal government is now spending less on health care with Obamacare than it was projected to spend without it. The bill was enacted in a democratic, deliberate, transparent, and excruciatingly slow fashion.

...

But none of that matters to any of these "journalists", because the corporations which they serve and which own the cameras and the microphones and make all personnel decision have made it perfectly clear that their careers depend 100% on never wavering one millimeter from the Establishment Party Line that Both Sides are equally to blame for everything, including the Rise of Trump.

This is Republican lifeboat building at its most frantic.  This is Joe Scarborough desperately trying to burnish his freshly-minted Fake Independent credentials as fast as possible.

And the thing it, it'll probably work.  But while you're thinking on that, think on this as well.  Think how enormously powerful we lowly Libtards must be that these gilded teevee turds are so terrified of us that we're not allowed anywhere near their sandbox while they're promulgating this toxic filth.

So why are they so terrified of us?

Because the Big Lie on which their careers depend is so terribly fragile -- so transparently false and so easily debunked -- that any Liberal with a functional memory could absolutely level these fuckers in less than a minute.  

Behold, a Tip Jar!