History is Bunk, Contd.

While sitting around the campfire on cold winter nights, some of us more disreputable tribal elders will entertain the youngers with tall tales from the dim and distant past.

Most of the youngers don't believe us, of course, because how could such impossible things have ever been be true?  We might as well be telling them stories of mermaids and space monsters.  Also many of the other elders among us scold us for filling their head with such piffle.   Whether true or not, wild stories of the Before Times are unhelpful.  Fables about long-ago herds of Neocons thundering across the plains destroying everything in their path are just time-wasting nonsense that don't till a single field or grind a single grain of wheat. 

For our part, we disreputable elders wear the disapproval of our bluecheck betters lightly.  Being outcasts for so long has worked a kind of magic on us, thickening our hides and sharpening our keen sense of irony.  We've already been permanently disinvited from all your reindeer games, so what's to lose?

We'll just do what we always do:  move out bedrolls and tents a little further from the hearth and a little deeper into the dark woods and go right on doing what we have always done.  Eventually a few youngers -- bored or curious -- will straggle on past and ask us to tell one of our taboo stories.

For example, did you know that Bill Kristol was not always the Leader of the Resistance?

(That always shocks them.  Gasps and boos usually follow.)

It's 100% true!  There was a time long ago when he was not the beloved of Brian Williams!  Nor of Chuck Todd!  Yea, even Joe Scarborough did smite him!

This is all heresy and nonsense, the youngers hoot.  No fucking way that can be true.  And some will storm away, angry they've wasted time listening to the blather of some old coots on the far outskirts of respectability.  But some will draw closer, amused, a few genuinely curious and a few others hoping to see our obvious bullshit flapdoodle blow up in our faces.

Then we roll this from October of 2016, and what remains of our audience gets real quiet:

And then come the confused protests...

But...but...how can it be that MSNBC Mommy and Daddy and Wise Old Uncle Bill Kristol are fighting.  And that Wise Old Uncle Bill Kristol was so completely fucking wrong about his own Republican Party?  And that made him so angry that he talked about MSNBC Mommy and Daddy...sucking up to Trump?

How can any of this be true?   I know MSNBC Mommy and Daddy never, ever sucked up to Trump because they say so every day on their teevee show.  And I know Wise Old Uncle Bill Kristol has always been brilliant and on the side of the angels because he's on the same teevee network as Chris Hayes and Joy Ann Reid and Rachel Maddow that would never be allowed if he were a bad person or horribly wrong all the time. 

Then we roll Rachel Maddow from March of 2014 absolutely slagging Bill Kristol as being the wrongest person in the universe:

Then, for comic relief, we roll out this exchange between Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow from the Before Time --

STEWART: It's incredible too, how quickly they jumped. And we listened to all these individuals, who were so wrong, led us to awry in the Iraq war, and they're immediately on television, with great confidence... ahhh, we're so naïve. It's been forty eight hours. Attack!! You know, it's... the hubris is incredible.

MADDOW: Yes. And that's because there hasn't been any accountability for the people who were wrong the first time. The people who said we ought to go, it's not going to take many people. It's going to pay for itself, it doesn't matter that we're not going to set up a government. Iraq will be right back on its feet. It will be a Jeffersonian democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

I mean, those guys got like, Paul Wolfowitz got to go like run the World Bank. Really? Like you shouldn't be running a light rail system in a small town in a country other than this one that we dislike. You can't actually have credibility on national security issues. You can't be Bill Kristol, for example, who was banging the drums harder than anybody else that we ought to go to Iraq, and that it would work out great, and now banging the drums for any subsequent war.

And shame on us for even asking their opinion.

-- which is part of a longer interview, available in its entirety over at Crooks & Liars.

And then it's time for the moral of the story.    That nothing the mainstream media does will make any sense to you until you understand that the mainstream media is a machine designed to insure Republicans escape accountability by obliterating history and drowning whatever inconvenient truths remain under a flood of false equivalents.

That the howls of disreputable Liberals like me, the mainstream media swiftly and efficiently whitewashed the reputation of obvious frauds and malefactors like Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol (and hundreds of others) so there is no doubt in my mind that, now that the precedent has been firmly enshrined, the mainstream media will provide the same swift and efficient services for most of the Trump administration traitors and their enablers in Congress and the press.

I realize that dragging Heroes of the Resistance like Scarborough and Kristol into a cautionary tale about the perils of selectively choosing to hold only some Republicans accountable for only some of monstrous things Republicans have done while letting some of the worst of them off the hook is not a popular opinion among the leaders of my tribe.  

On the other hand Socrates was forced to drink hemlock for such “impiety” and for “corrupting the young” so I think I can handle being sentenced to a little stink-eye from some of my more accommodationist allies.

No Half Measures