Sunday Morning Comin' Down: Reruns, Because It's Always Reruns

From Crooks & Liars:

Chuck Todd Suggests America's Toxic Politics Is Obama's Fault: He Didn't 'Bring This Country Together'

NBC News' weakest link continues to normalize the GOP's destruction of democratic norms and institutions by blaming President Barack Obama for the Republican Party's obstructionism.

From the Meet the Press transcript:

CHUCK TODD:   You're not the first candidate to say, "I'm going to bring this country together." The most recent Democratic president a lot of people put their hope in and thought he was the answer that was going to do that. Why do you think that didn't happen in Obama's eight years? 

Longtime readers might remember that back in the long ago time when Tim Russert hosted Meet the Press and The Chris Matthews Show was a thing--

-- each Sunday I would rise early at Castle Driftglass, gird my loins, and dutifully and energetically "document the atrocities" of various Sunday Shows.

Over the years I changed the name of this feature a few times, spiced it up as YouTube video and embeddable Tweets became available (yes, I have been at this that long) and gradually stopped paying any attention to Fox News at all because frankly why bother?  Fox Sunday programming has always been a shitshow of lies, Liberal slandering and Republican propaganda.  That was the purpose for which Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch created it, and there was never any chance that it was ever going to do anything but slouch its away to the lower and lower the dankest, most overtly-fascist circles of media Hell.

Instead, over the years, I shifted my focus the the "respectable" shows.  "Meet the Press". "Face the Nation". "This Week With...Whoever is Subbing for Snuffleupagus This Week".  My admittedly vain hope was that since these sorts of corporate programs had to at least pretending to care about facts and journalism, that as the GOP slid further and further into unhinged, public lunacy, it might be possible to occasionally shame these programs into paying some kind of tribute to the truth.

As I said, this was a vain hope.  Our corporate political media is institutionally incapable of reforming itself.  Because although I wrote this specifically about Tom Friedman 14 years ago, it was and is broadly applicable to the entire Beltway media all the time.   Remember as you read this that it was written by me during the darkest days of the Dubya administration.  This was the year Barack Obama was sworn in as the junior senator from Illinois, and Donald Trump wasn't even a twinkle in David Duke's eye.

[According to Tom Friedman] the Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.

And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!

Behold, a Tip Jar!