Sunday Morning Comin' Down: Break's Over

I am told by my tribal elders that once upon a time, Meet the Press was something interesting and performed a useful, social function.

Maybe this is true.  Maybe not.  I cannot speak to that.

What I do know is that it's now nothing but a defunct carnival ride, abandoned, rusting, running the same paint-flaking plaster ponies over the same creaky tracks going in the same, useless circles over and over again.  Playing the same tired music over and over again. Operated by a breathtakingly overpaid hack who clearly doesn't care whether or not the ride sucks, as long as it completes its circuit.

Meet the Press (and the Sunday Shows generally) may have once existed as a venue for persons of public importance to be interrogated by the press, but those days are long over.  Now they are puppet theaters, created to advance the Beltway establishment party line.

Several years ago I swapped the name of this semi-regular feature from "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" to "Voice of Empire" because that's really what it is:  propaganda broadcasts from a tiny, powerful corporate city/state that happens to exist geographically within my country, that tarts itself up in the First Amendment language of my country and exercises a wildly outsized influence over the public political conversations on my country...but really his nothing to do with with my country.  It doesn't share out problems or concerns.  It's hostile to our language and customs.  And quite frankly it does not care if we live or die or slide into full banana republic-hood as long as the ratings are good.

And that is really the only reason to pay attention to them at all.  Because if you listen they'll come right out and tell you in clear, unambiguous terms exactly what the authorized Beltway lie is on any given day.

For example, because the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It has been the pillar that props up the entire Beltway enterprise for decades, the past two years of the reign of President Stupid and his lapdog congress have driven the Beltway media mad not because having an authoritarian racist lunatic in charge of the country is, y'know, a bad thing, but because it has made allocating the blame the crimes of that authoritarian racist lunatic and his lap dog congress across both political parties virtually impossible.

Of course, they tried their damnedest, especially the flagship newspaper of the Beltway establishment.  From a woman named Sabrina Tavernise in The New York Times a year ago --

Are Liberals Helping Trump?

...Liberals may feel energized by a surge in political activism, and a unified stance against a president they see as irresponsible and even dangerous. But that momentum is provoking an equal and opposite reaction on the right. In recent interviews, conservative voters said they felt assaulted by what they said was a kind of moral Bolshevism — the belief that the liberal vision for the country was the only right one. Disagreeing meant being publicly shamed.

-- who decided to go all the way in on her idiot thesis by comparing being Republican in 2017 with being gay in the 1950s:

“The name calling from the left is crazy,” said Bryce Youngquist, 34, who works in sales for a tech start-up in Mountain View, Calif., a liberal enclave where admitting you voted for Mr. Trump is a little like saying in the 1950s that you were gay. “They are complaining that Trump calls people names, but they turned into some mean people.”

Both Siderist hot takes this shitty were the inevitable result of being caught between the overwhelming pressure to keep up the Both Sides Do It lie while being faced with a political landscape that was completely denuded of any remotely plausible equivalence between the Party of Trump and any, well, anything else.

Gone were the halcyon days when Chuck Todd could solemnly declare that the fact that the Trump campaign hired a racist as its CEO and the Clinton campaign pointing out that the Trump campaign had hired a racist as its CEO was somehow a "race to the bottom". 

Of course a few of the Usual Beltway Drudges (David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Bill Maher, etc.) have gleaned the hell out of the stubble of the fields trying to make an entire Both Siderist meal out of, say, a few brownshirts being protested on a few college campuses.   But after awhile I got the impression that even they became embarrassed at the obviousness of their attempt diffuse the corruption and sedition of the Republican party into a fine mist of "Both Sides Are Equally Bad".  After that, their whole "Campus Speech Code Thugs!"scam just kinda dried up and blew away under the constant, 1,000 decibel barrage of lies, racism and madness from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (Don't worry, it will be back.)

So (you ask) whatever happened to the ham-fisted goofball who equated being gay in a country and at a time where being gay was a felony in many places with being a Republican in a country and at a time when Republicans currently run everything?

Why the House of Sulzberger recognized her value of course!  And gave her even more work at The New York Times.  Currently she is writing dispatched from America's unexplored interior about how everything you know is wrong, how the Righteous Centrist Majority is sick of all the shouting from Both Sides, and how no one can tell who is right or wrong anymore. 

These Americans Are Done With Politics

The Exhausted Majority needs a break.

...“It feels very lonely out here,” said Jamie McDaniel, a 36-year-old home health care worker in Topeka, Kan., one of several people in the study who was interviewed for this article. “Everybody is so right or left, and you’re just kind of standing there in the middle saying, “What happened?’”

And here is the problem.

You can spot a wingnut who is fully addicted to Hate Radio and Fox News easily enough.  They're the raving, racist imbeciles to voted for Bush twice, then spent eight year pretending they'd never heard of Bush for eight years while shitting themselves over the Kenyan Tyrant in the White House cleaning up their messes, and then they voted for the King of the Birthers. When speedballing Hannity and Ingraham isn't enough they'll line up to mainline completely fake conspiracies, even from self-identified parody sites like  America’s Last Line of Defense (from the WaPo)

‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America

...He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”...

But as the Right glutted itself on racist trash and conspiracies and grew ever more stridently public in their insanity, another mob of helpless addicts revealed themselves, codependent with the Right, but much more brittle and parasitic.  These are America's Both Siderist junkies.  Our very own Good Germans, so determined not to ever stand for anything -- so obsessed with hunkering down in safe quicksand of the nonexistent "center" and writing off every Republican atrocity as the fault of the Extremes on Both Sides -- that until Donald John Trump personally drives a tank through their living room and throws their kids in a cage, they will continue to sound like Dr. Elizabeth Damon of Eagle Point, Oregon:

Elizabeth Damon, 54, a veterinarian in Eagle Point, Ore., is a registered Democrat because “I really don’t think anybody should be able to tell me what to do with my own body.” But she also thinks the party has drifted too far left, and in 2016 she voted for Donald Trump.

“More than anything, they just want to pick fights,” Dr. Damon said of Democrats. The Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh was one example, she said.

Since it would take no more than more than five minutes of basic research to debunk Dr. Damon's opinions about Democrats drifting "too far to the left" or "just want[ing] to pick fights", I wonder why she has not bothered to do so?

But I don't really wonder why because  I suspect that Dr. Damon does not have opinions so much as she (and and millions of others like her) have excuses.  And however many of Dr. Damon's excuses one might waste one's time dismantling, there will always be another one.  Because people like Dr. Damon don't fear the Democratic party drifting too far to the left half as much as they fear the staggering moral implications of finally being forced to admit that the Republican party really is nothing but a toxic shitpile of bigots and imbeciles.

That the Left really has been right about the Right all along.

And so -- exactly like the Fox News watcher and Hate Radio addict -- people like Dr. Damon are not socially or psychologically capable of facing the consequences of grim reality they sense closing in all around them.  Instead, they take refuge in a flimsy bouncy house of Both Siderist propaganda which constantly reassures them that the Extremes on Both Sides are the real problem, and that their besieged Sensible Center is the safe and sensible place to be.

From The New York Times again:

“I prefer to be in the dark because of all of the hostility going on,” she said...

“It’s like World War I, where you’re pushing each other back and forth over the same quarter-mile of ground and nothing happens,” said Christopher Kershaw, 39, a logistics manager in rural New Jersey...

Which brings us all the way back around to Chuck Todd and Brother Charlie Pierce, who has also taken a hiatus from covering the Sunday Shows --

We placed this feature in the storeroom of the shebeen because, frankly, we got bored with it, and it was too much work keeping up with what the gobshites were saying in the age of Trump. 

-- because they little more than a wasteland of Conservative leg-humping and Beltway fainting goats.

But just this once...

If an Election Was Stolen, Say It Was Stolen

Lessons from Sherrod Brown and Chuck Todd.

...But we're reviving it just this once because of this interesting moment that occurred on Meet The Press between Chuck Todd and the recently re-elected Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Under discussion was the manner in which Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp used the power of his office to help him finagle his way to the governorship over Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

From the Meet the Press transcript:

TODD: Let me start with you were out this week, talking about another race in 2018. And it was in Georgia and Stacey Abrams. It was before she had acknowledged her defeat. She has now admitted defeat, didn't call it a concession. But I want to ask you about something you said this week about Georgia. Let me play it.

SEN. SHERROD BROWN: If Stacey Abrams doesn't win in Georgia, they stole it. It's clear. It's clear. And I would say, I say that publicly. It's clear.

CHUCK TODD: Strong language to throw that out there. You believe, today, that this is a stolen race, that basically, Brian Kemp is, is somebody who's illegally governor right-- or governor-elect of Georgia.

SEN. SHERROD BROWN:  Well, I think you look at the lead-up to this election as secretary of state -- and I was the secretary of state in Ohio 30 years ago. I know what you do, as secretary of state. You encourage people to vote. You don't purge millions of voters. You don't close down polling places in rural areas where voters have difficulty getting to the polls, which were mostly low-income areas. You don't do what Republicans are doing all over the country. And you've seen it, Chuck. You've seen the kind of voter suppression that, all over this country. And you end with the secretary of state of Georgia should have recused himself from running that election, as Jimmy -- as former -- Georgia resident, former-President Jimmy Carter said he should. And clearly, he did everything he could to put his thumb on the scale and won that election, quote unquote, "won" that election by only about a point.

Chuck Todd tried valiantly to block Sherrod Brown's path with his mighty Both Siderist sword:

CHUCK TODD:  I guess I would ask this. Couldn't you bring up all of those, all of those issues, lay all of that out, without using the word, stolen? And I throw that out there, because we have enough distrust in our institutions as it is. --

But today Sherrod Brown was going to have none of it (emphasis added):

SEN. SHERROD BROWN: Well -- don’t, wait, don’t --

CHUCK TODD: --Does that add to it?

SEN. SHERROD BROWN:  Okay, Chuck. Don't do the false equivalency of, of, of, the, you know, the lack of respect in institutions. I mean, we have a president that attacks your profession day after day after day. You, if you saw the earlier part of my election-night speech, you would've heard me thank the media. And you would've seen hundreds of people in Ohio, on the Democratic -- at this election-night gathering, turn around and clap for the media. We see a president that goes after the courts, that goes after the judicial system, a president that says, as the votes were counted, that something's been wrong with the elections. He criticizes the elections that way. So don't play this false equivalency. Because a former secretary of state, like me, said that about this election, which clearly is an effort to suppress the vote, not of people that look like you and me, Chuck--

CHUCK TODD: Right.

SEN. SHERROD BROWN:  --but people of color especially. And it's happened. Now spend your air time-- I don't mean to lecture--

CHUCK TODD:  No, no, no, I, look --

SEN. SHERROD BROWN:  -- but spend your airtime critical of those people who are trying to suppress the vote.

And, right on schedule, The New York Times has also put its draft horses back in the Both Sides Do It harness and ordered them to pull:

Charges of Vote Stealing in Florida Portend More Distrust in System for 2020

The chaotic images out of Florida’s election recount last week — the brigade of Washington lawyers, the déjà vu meltdown of the tallying in Broward County, the vitriolic charges and countercharges — have prompted flashbacks among the electorate of the 2000 presidential election.

Yet to the combatants in both parties...

My point is this: break's over.

Behold, a Tip Jar!