The Importance of Being on Teevee

 

The screenshot below is a peek into the back room of my blog.  Specifically the specs on a post I wrote about No Labels two days after they launched back in 2010.  It is (no false modesty) well-written, eerily prescient and I have referenced it and linked to it several times, and I have written about No Labels regularly over the past 13 years.

You will note that, over the course of those 13 years, my shameless, one-man-band promotion of my own work has yielded --

-- exactly 3,497 views and 16 comments.  Which, I can assure you, is huge compared most of the other +11,000 posts I've written over the past 18 years.

Comes now an amoral, GOP goon named Rick Wilson who, back in 2010, was busy using every filthy trick and barely concealed racist dog-whistle he could lay his hands on to try to stomp to death everything you and I value.   If you were aware of Wilson ar all back in 2010 it was probably due to his infamously sleazy attack ad against Max Cleland.  From Brother Charlie Pierce:

Max Cleland Did Not Deserve What Rick Wilson Did to Him

...Cleland was running against a Republican named Saxby Chambliss, a nonentity who’d been deferred during the Vietnam War because of an old high-school football injury. While in the Senate, Cleland had voted for the Bush tax cuts in 2001, and for the invasion of Iraq, which he later called the worst vote of his career. But as legislation to set up the new Department of Homeland Security sailed through Congress, Cleland fought to give the employees of that department union protections. And that was opening enough for the ratfckers to get him.

Rove called on an ambitious conservative ad man named Rick Wilson to put together one of the most scurrilous attack ads since Lee Atwater gave Willie Horton his turn at centerstage. The ad opened with pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and the point of the ad was that Max Cleland, who left half his body in a war zone, lacked the gumption to "lead" during the time of terror.

As late as July 2015 Wilson was still defending the filth he injected into the American body politic --

Yet today, @TheRickWilson is "shocked, shocked I say" to see conservatives slander Alexander Vindman. Dude, you planted and tilled this GOP/Conservative garden. You fertilized it with the filth like the Cleland ad. Own it already.

— Xtopher in SD 🏳️‍🌈🖖🏻 (@Xto4) October 29, 2019

-- and as late as February 2016, Wilson was demanding that the senate's Republican majority conspire to steal a supreme court seat from The Kenyan Usurper.

3/ The Senate can and must deny Obama the chance to make an appointment to the Supreme Court. We have both the votes and the power to do so.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 13, 2016

Ah, but Ricky has something neither you nor I have.   After his own party shit him out like yesterday's corn on the cob, Rick still had friends and fellow travelers in the media.  Friends and fellow travelers who would put him and his fellow recently-former Republicans on teevee over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until their pasts and their reputations had been bleached as white as Anderson Cooper's hair.

And just like *that* they became Heroes of the Resistance.

Look I'm no fool.  I know this battle is lost.  I know that, once again, a thing I warned was gonna happen has happened exactly as I predicted it would. I know that, like the baptismal waters of the River Jordan, teevee has the power to wash away the past and rebirth a scoundrel into a saint.  Of course, when a scoundrel is baptized by teevee, they remain a scoundrel -- cynically unrepentant and god damn proud of it -- because in the end, it's all just a show.  One year this mope is on Fox pleasuring the Fox morons with tall tales about what America-hating, terrorist-loving commie scum Liberals are ... and the next year the same mope on MSNBC pleasuring credulous Liberals with scary stories about what America-hating, treasonous morons Republicans are.  

And both times, the mope is wrapped in a flag, bleating about patriotism.  

And 95% of those credulous Liberals have no fucking idea what that mope were saying or doing before that moment: to them, he's just some guy that suddenly appeared on the teevee saying things that make them happy.  After all MSNBC thinks he's credible enough to put him on the air over and over and over again.   Plus he's saying all the things that they agree with! Yay!  

Finally someone has the balls to call out Republicans as naughtybad!  

Why has nobody ever had the gut to do this before now!!

Bartlett West GIFfrom Bartlett GIFs

And he's fronting for some outfit that they've never heard before which promises to do Great Things!  To Save Murrica Democracy!  Because stupid Dems are too stupid and weak to Save Murrica Democracy!  And this new outfit will happily accept your cash, credit card, Apply Pay or money orders to, y'know, Save Murrica Democracy!

Like I said, I know this fight is over and I know we lost.  Again.  Actual Liberal voices who understood and warned about the lethal trajectory the GOP has been on for half a century have once again been blocked, ignored and otherwise shoved even further to the margins, while an army of aggressively revisionist Bush Regime Dead-Enders have successfully colonized cable teevee, taken control of the political narrative, and have user their dominance on cable teevee to make their own media startups into money machines and virtual subdivisions of MSNBC and CNN.

This is, instead, a lesson in the power of teevee.  A lesson offered far too late to do anyone any good.

After 13 years of banging pots and shouting down every rain barrel I could find, the general sense of alarm about No Labels had risen from nil to ... bupkis.  Nobody knew or cared.  Dude, why are you wasting all this time obsessing over these irrelevant, Beltway nimrods?  

Then, suddenly, these irrelevant Beltway nimrods became a Menace to Democracy.  

Oh my god!  Why didn't anyone warn us of this dire threat before now!!

Bartlett West GIFfrom Bartlett GIFs

But don't worry, Murrica, because Rick Wilson is on the case.  

And in one Tweet, Ricky garners...

...three million views, +14,000 likes, +7.300 retweets and 407 comments.  

And that, kids, is just one of the many tangible examples of the power of teevee. 

Burn The Lifeboats