Comedy Gold is Where You Find It

For a person on a tight budget, which I am, finding entertainment on-the-cheap can be a challenge.  When I lived in the Big City, I could attend city council meetings which were free and open to the public, and almost always had some gratis jollies for us groundlings.  

I remember as if it were yesterday the time when a new upstart alderman got publicly roasted like a pig on a spit by two old warhorses for daring to...

But I digress.

These days, what with the internet and all, funny can be found almost anywhere, even for someone like me whose tastes run to the politically low and perverse.  For example, I find the rank hypocrisy of many of our Never Trump "allies" to be very entertaining.  I tell ya, the things these mopes talk about among themselves when they're not mic'd up and on camera on MSNBC can be pure chocolate.

For example, when Messers Charlie Sykes and Tom Nichols were in conversation about "How did it ever get so bad?" Mr. Nichols let this one fly.  Mind you, both of these men are now MSNBC employees and would never cop to this shit on the air:

Nichols:  But the left, you know, has always been more about heart and empathy. And this is really cold and inhuman, and I hope that there are people on the left talking to their comrades about this. Because I wanted to jump on the one point and sort of add to that mea culpa when people start, y'know, and you’ve seen me play this game with people on social media, oh, this all began with Reagan and it began with Nixon and it began with.   No.  If you really wanna hammer the conservatives, it is those of us who did not wanna look around us to see who we were in a coalition with. That is the great sin, I think.  You know, when I was a Massachusetts Republican, I didn’t care what the Wyoming Republicans were doing. I just cared that they were Republicans.

That is "The Death of Expertise" author Tom Nichols, explaining that own expertise on the one subject on which he is called upon to opine -- the state of the Republican Party -- apparently only extends as far as the Berkshire mountains.  Because, according to Tom, during all the long and terrible decades during which the GOP was very publicly devolving into an out-and-proud suppurating shitpile of bigots -- 

-- he, personally, never had any idea that his Republican Party was full of Republicans because, uh, see, he was in Massachusetts the whole time.

Now lets flip the calendar back just a touch to see how Mr. Nichols routinely reacted any suggestion that, just maybe, conservatives could exhibit just a smidge of contrition for having let their own party get so completely fucked in the head.

You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019

And when I poked that bear once or twice, which is how Mr. Personal Responsibility reacted.

Because no professional media Conservative haver-of-opinions can afford to have their rep damaged by getting publicly slobbersknockered  by some nobody blogger from nowhere.

Hilarious!  And also the entente of the mainstream media writ small.  They have manufactured a history of the Republican party that suits the illusions of their funders, the delusions of their Both Sides Do It customers while at the same time camouflaging the complicity of their colleagues in refusing to notice the rising insanity of the GOP until it was far, far too late.

The next joke is how relentlessly their original Hate Radio/Fox News operating system continues running just below the surface.  However much our Never Trump "allies" may have been mortified by the rise of Trump and however stunned they have been to discover that their Republican party was full of Republicans all along, two things remain constant.  

First, they would rather chug rat poison while flinging themselves off of a ten story building in the maw of a woodchipper than ever, ever let the words "The Left was right all along" pass their lips.  

Second, to continue to hang onto the tatters of their precious True Conservatives bona fides while continuing to market their media companies as "Non-Tribal" enterprises that stand against the "extremes on Boths Side", on virtually every Never Trump podcast you will find a segment which I think of as "The Shit on the Left" interlude.  They scrape together something -- anything -- no matter how trivial or purely fiction on which to hang a bitch session about "the Left".  And once again, this is the same cravenness of the mainstream media writ small -- this Both Siderist fetish that they believe will save them from being tagged as -- shudder -- Liberal.  

So here we go with that.

Charlie Sykes:  Okay. So we’ve talked about Donald Trump. We talked about the Republicans. We have to talk about the Pro-Hamas Left. 

Do we?  Really?  

Sykes continues.

Sykes:  And by the way, I’ve spent much of the week being reassured by people that, though, the Pro-Hamas Left is too small.  It’s not significant. We can simply ignore them.  And it’s certainly true that this does not reflect most of the Left. It does not reflect certainly a very many, you know, elected Democrats. 

Cool.  So we agree.  They're a rounding error with no actual influence over anything.  So we can move on, right?

Nope.

Sykes: On the other hand, this is a thing, Tom. And I wanna read you...

And we're off to the races.   Because they absolutely cannot help themselves.  Because they just need that one drink, or maybe two drinks, to, y'know, to steady themselves.  To take the edge off.  

Hilarious.

And finally, one quick punch-line.  Not fall-down-laughing, but worth a smile when I remember the entire raft of shit we Liberal took for the way we talked about the Republicans base.  When I remember how many times were were lectured y our Never Trump supervisors about it being our snobbish condescension that was to blame for driving noble, salt-of-the-Earth Republican Americans into the arms of Donald Trump.  

Oh how we were sternly warned that, if we wanted to save our democracy, we must deal with Republican voters as one would deal with large, frightened, and possibly rabid forest creatures:  no matter how much racist crazy was pouring out of their mouths, we were to approach them slowly, speaking only in calm, even tones.  No sudden gestures.  No judgemental language.  No loud or insulting language, because at the slightest hint or flicker of reproof they would bolt right back into the Trump camp and it would be all out fault.  

Remember all of that and listen to how our Never Trump supervisors talk about Republican voters now.

Nichols:  But because [Trump] does ... the whole performance art, you know, for Rube America that loves the little boy [voice],  And the hands.  And the the pinky extension and all that.

They talk this way about the Republican base all the time now. They've left "Denial" far behind and have apparently decided to camp out in "Anger" for the foreseeable future.  Seething, searing anger at the mob of Republican bigots and imbeciles that they had build their careers either pandering to or aggressively ignoring.

The same mob that we Liberals had been warning them about for decades.  

But of course, these men -- who spent their careers wrapping themselves in the language of Patriotism,  Virtue and Tough Love and who snobbishly and condescendingly lectured us po', dumb Liberals on the importance of Facing Hard Facts and Personal Responsibility -- can never admit that. 

And if you can't see the dark humor in that, well, I feel just a little bit sorry for you.   

Burn The Lifeboats

Make S'Mores On The Coals