Sunday Morning Comin' Down

This Sunday was just ugly.  Butt ugly.  Bigly butt ugly.

So, y'know, typical day at The Mouse Circus.

For example, as I sit here, I appear to be the only contrarian curmudgeon who did not view Jake Tapper cutting off Stephen Miller's microphone after that wind-up toy brownshirt Gish Galloped around the studio and back again as some sort of triumph of Truth and Journalism.

No, Jake. In fact Truth and Journalism took another size 13 steel-toed Timberland to the yam sack the minute you decided to let this degenerate liar on teevee at all. 

Allow me to explain. 

Miller's showed up with one objective in mind -- the same objective as Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Richard Spencer and pretty much every other bomb-throwing Conservative goon every time someone in authority is stupid enough to give them a public platform.  To come right off the blocks as loud and offensive and relentlessly noxious as possible so that they either bulldoze right over anyone who gets in their way, or to get themselves cut off. 

If they simply out-shoutycracker any attempt to reason with them, they win, Gish Gallop-style:

During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.

If they are cut-off, they join the ranks of  Free Speech Martyrs and their cause can then be safely picked up and used as Both Siderist fodder by respectable Beltway Quislings like Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, Michael Gerson.

In this case, Stephen Miller managed to do both.  

So much winning! 

And no matter how much my Liberal friends and fellow travelers cheer and high-five Mr. Tapper for "exposing" Miller as a fool and a liar, I will ask again for the millionth time, "expose" to whom exactly?  Who is there left in the political world that is still on the fence about this whole Fascist Nightmare Presidency thing?  Certainly not us despised Libtards who have already shouted ourselves hoarse for decades that the GOP was headed down this very dark road.  And certainly not Centrists, for whom no Republican atrocity will ever be grave enough for them to leave their Both Siderist safe space.  And as for the reprogrammable meatbags of the Republican Party, I guarantee you, if they saw Millers' performance at all, it was pure Hulk Hogan versus The Deep State Fake Media Iron Sheik for them.

This was one of my many reactions on Twitter early Sunday morning.

"The best" would be to never give stupid, obsequious Roy Cohn wannabes a platform at all.

— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) January 7, 2018

And like fucking clockwork...

Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 7, 2018

So here is my radical idea. 

Just stop it.

Stop giving lying scumbags who you know are lying scumbags any airtime anywhere.

Stop it, because any airtime of any kind just feeds oxygen to this dumpster fire.

Stop trying to be clever.

Stop thinking you're "exposing" anything.

Just. Stop. Doing. It.

Because as with global thermonuclear war, the only winning move in the game of Wingnut With a Microphone is not to play.

Later, on the same program, lying Trump stoop Mike Caputo was practically in tears because he swears he never in his life seen like anything like the hateful personal attacks that are leveled against on Donald Trump.  Never.

And no one thought to maybe mention the previous eight years during which the raw, open-sewage racist Birther, Kenyan Usurper, Palling Around With Terrorists, Mooch-elle bullshit was the commonplace vocabulary of the GOP every single fucking day.  I'm not saying that any responsible journalist would have put a boot on Mr. Caputo's throat and force-fed him a sample platter of the wingnut racist agitprop until he shit Confederate flags.  I am saying that it would have made for some damn fine teevee.

And while The Stephen and Scratchy Show was keeping the hoi polloi mesmerized --

-- the real work of the Beltway media -- its most important project -- went right on, steadily and quietly.

And what is that real work?

Building lifeboats of course. 

Because whatever uninhabitable political wasteland President Stupid leaves behind for the Democrats to clean up, you can bet the rent and beer money that the Beltway media will not allow the responsibility for any of it to land on them or their Republican cronies and co-conspirators. 

Which is why members of the Beltway Pundit Shipwright Guild can be found hard at work every single day trying to Flex Seal the rags and bones of the Party of Lincoln together --

-- into a vessel seaworthy enough for them to escape the righteous judgment of history once again.

Here, for example, is Mr. David Brooks on Meet the Press making the patently and laughably false assertion that somehow  Trump and Trump alone is the problem and that it was just bad luck that noble souls like Jefferson Beauregard Session and Lindsey Graham are stuck working with a madman:

DAVID BROOKS: ... The Sessions thing is interesting to me because you've got all these people in Trump world, like Sessions, like Lindsey Graham, who are trying to do something good for the country, or what they believe is good for the country, and they're stuck working with this guy Trump. And they're stuck in an administration which is a snake pit with no sense of camaraderie, no sense of teamwork. And so they're in this miserable position, they're trying to do something good for the country, as they see it, whether you agree or not. And they're stuck dealing with this madhouse. And I sort of have some respect for the way they're trying to struggle through this problem.

Which is why our motto at The Professional Left podcast is, Burn The Lifeboats.

Behold, a Tip Jar!