No Fair Remembering Stuff: Sunday Morning Comin' Down

 

Today, instead of deconstructing what happened on the Sunday Gasbag Cavalcade this Sunday, we shall take a brief trip back a decade.  This post is especially for those pundits out there in teevee and radio land who are still making a living scratching their collective asses and hypothesizing ponderously about how in the world things got so fucked up.

The answer to their gassy pondering is not tricky or difficult at all.  In fact it's right there available to anyone who cares to venture into the Forbidden Zone where pundits dare not tread.

The Forbidden Zone of The Past.

Things got so fucked up because, in The Past, the instigators of the disasters through which we are all now slogging were picked up, dusted off and rehabilitated by the media over and over and over again.  Political orcs and hobgoblins whose public careers should have been dead in a ditch long ago were  systematically resuscitated and sent back into the world to do even more damage, while those of us using our tiny platforms to shout, "Jesus, Mary and Edward R. Murrow, for the sake of the nation, stop doing this!?" were systematically silenced.

Long story short, they didn't listen to our dire warnings, they didn't stop doing this terrible thing, and here we are.  So today I bring you, from the dim and distant past, of September 28, 2012, The Gingrich Rules (Ctd.)

The Gingrich Rules, Ctd.

Remain in effect.

Regular readers will already be familiar with the Gingrich Rules to the point of tedium:

In the game of professional punditry there also clearly exists a special set of rules designed with one person on mind.  Or, rather, one sort of person: Conservatism's parade of bomb-throwing, hate-mongering, race-baiting bottom feeders.  That breed which makes their daily bread from grifting the Pig People by generating an endless flood of books, magazine articles, broadcasts, speeches and videos all telling the GOP base over and over again that their bigotries are noble and their paranoia is patriotic. 

Of course, part of the downside of wallowing in the wingnut sewer and trafficking in slander and lies is that, sooner or later, you become a toxic mess.  Your stink becomes unacceptable to the general public, which s where the Sunday morning talk shows -- the Mouse Circus -- comes in.   Because despite having long ago devolved into a sinkhole of Beltway centrist twaddle, it is still viewed by altogether too many people as a bastion of Very Serious people -- it's the strip-mall of political opinion where casual shoppers go to feel smart and validated.

And so a bargain is struck; the bottom feeders deliver a temporary hike in the only thing these show's owners really care about -- audience share -- and, in exchange for being teevee friendly and keeping the worst of their batshit crazy on a leash for a few minutes, their Mouse Circus deburrs the bottom feeders' public image, replates and burnishes their credibility and temporarily transfuses them with Seriousness, which can then be redeemed at ten times its face value back among the Pig People.

And in the key to that bargain we find "The Gingrich Rules":  an agreement that the moderator will never, ever ask the bomb-throwing, hate-mongering, race-baiting goon sitting directly across from them a single question about their bomb-throwing, hate-mongering or race-baiting activities.  Instead they will be represented to the public merely as a Conservative commentator or talk radio host or pundit who, at worst, might be known for some "controversial" opinions, which the moderator will never bother to explicate.  *

This week -- fulfilling the darkest predictions of Mayan priests of prophecy -- the Definer Of Civilization's Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces will manifest himself on the physical plane long enough to have his professional reputation cleaned, blocked, deburred and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-rehabilitated,  this time by Grandpa Bob Schieffer on his #1 Very Best Public Affairs Program For Television Viewing.

Fundamentally.

Basically.

Gingrich went on the become a senior media Trump Whisperer and for his efforts his Blowjob Queen Wife #3 (h/t Tengrain) was made ambassador to the Vatican by Trump.  And to underscore the point one more time, from Blue Gal's 2010 archives comes this photo of Arianna Huffington in Amalfi, Italy, hanging out with Newt and Callista Gingrich, mega-entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman and his wife Deborah, and Barbara Walters.

Were it not for a supine and complicit media willing to launder the reputations of the worst scum in American politics over and over again, we would not be in the terrible danger we're in.  Which is why one of the mottoes of this tiny blog in the middle of a cornfield has long been...

...Burn The Lifeboats