Monday, January 08, 2018

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.



And like fucking clockwork...

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 TerroristsMooch-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!

6 comments:

dinthebeast said...

What? There were Republicans in the lifeboat when I set it on fire?
Bummer.

-Doug in Oakland

trgahan said...

"...the only winning move in the game of Wingnut With a Microphone is not to play."

And the real news story is that, in 2018, the media is FORCED to play again and again.

They CAN'T treat Bannon, Miller, or even just a Trump voter like they treat someone arguing to nationalize the banks, a Civil Rights activists, or even a democratic voter who lives outside New York or California.

The result your average prime time news/cable TV viewer probably knows more Nazi's and White Supremacists and their idea than they know Democrats, much less actually progressive thinkers and/or ideas.

Almost as if by design....

Robt said...

If I were alloof with twitter fingers...

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

Viewers, consumers do not prefer to dwell on Alex Jones light.

It is like exposing people to small Pox.

They are still looking for the return on ratings for televising Trump's empty podium awaiting him.
A harmful side effect equivalent to Viagra if lasting long than 4 hours. See your doctor.

They need to get this straight ,
Trumpers, republicans are not tuning in to CNN to hear their white supremacists rage.
They have websites like Storm boner and Mis Info mhines.

Aurora Silvermane said...

Basically, what it comes down to is that watching Jake Tapper not put up with Pee Wee's horseshit to his face is emotionally satisfying (it *is* all infortainment anyway, isn't it?). It's one thing to see liberals refute the crazies' bile on Last Week Tonight or Full Frontal from a distance to a sympathetic audience, but watching Us stand up to Them on the playground is a different animal. It pokes holes in the conservative "liberals are pussies that can't face us" narrative. Will conservatives ever accept it and admit defeat? Of course not; they'll slink off and cry about being The Most Persecuted Patriots EVAR for Just Speaking Their Truth, all the while telling us that we're the REAL sensitive emotional snowflakes for knocking them in the teeth.

This is separate from Democratic politicians trying to win over an imaginary audience of Independent Moderates by being The Adults In The Room. Conservatives are experts at manipulating audiences through the teevee machine. Turns out, a solid 90% of politics is marketing and entertainment. We have a reality teevee show president right now with absolutely no experience in government at all. While it's true that he may be there because he was given a microphone by a complicit media in the first place, it's probably more important to note that that's what works. The GOP enablers will never, ever come around on this. Might as well use their biases (e.g., Spectacle, Laziness, Cheap and Easy to Cover, etc.) to our advantage.

Unknown said...


Driftglass: I thought of you when I read this quote from William "Billy' Kristol in a Vox interview on the "slide" into Trumpism:

"That slippery slope is more slippery than I realized".

Especially when you've been greasing it for 40 years.





tequilamockingbird said...

For a masterful Gish Gallop performance, watch "pastor" Mark Burns with Joy Reid today on AM Joy.