One if by Land. Two if by Sea. Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News Teevee.

As most of you already know, thanks to his ability to squint really hard and conjure mirages into mountains, and daydreams into deliverers, decade after decade, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has complied an unbroken record of manifesting, out of thin air, one Republican savior after another and one rising Conservative reform "movement" after another.

Of course they're always juuuust around the corner, "deep in the bowels of the G.O.P" or laboring industriously but anonymously away in statehouses, but always on the verge of springing into action. And thanks to Brooks' insider knowledge and special powers of observation, over and over again he has confidently reassured his readers that salvation was definitely heading our way at speed, so ignore those Liberal crackpots and alarmists in the steeple of the Old North Church, shouting and hooting and waving three lanterns.

(You remember the Longfellow poem, right? One if by land.  Two if by sea.  Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News teevee...)

Down through the decades as the danger from the Right very publicly loomed ever closer, the legacy media's message never changed:  Don't you little people worry your little heads about any of that noise, because the Conservative Establishment (whose spokesmodels found a welcoming home on every channel and in every newspaper) has got this!

By 2009, David Brooks' Republican party was already doomed to eventually become the instrument of some monster or another.  It was a roiling shitpile of bigots and imbeciles finishing out their first year of what would be an uninterrupted, eight-year-long hysterical racist primal scream: their reaction to the Democrats electing a Centrist Eisenhower Republican named Barack Obama who wasted his entire first term and much of his second trying to reach out to a mob of angry, racist lunatics who would have none of it, but which the Conservative Establishment kept insisting did not exist.

From his vantage point comfortably ensconced in the Acela Corridor quiet car,  Brooks remained willfully oblivious to all of it, leading a legacy media cottage industry dedicated to looking right past what was obviously happening right in front of them, and instead focusing on a series of Conservatives saviors who were just over the horizon and therefor invisible to mere mortals

Instead...

 

Serious people.  

Quiet conversations.  

"austerity brigades".  Heh.

Even as the Rough Beast -- the end-product of decades of Conservatives handing their politics and media over to monsters like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater and on and on and on -- slouched towards Election Day to be born, this avatar of the legacy media refused to behold what he had helped to create

Brooks, September 2015 with emphasis added for entertainment purposes:

The outsiders are about to slide. Trump’s Don Rickles act wears thin. His ego may be galaxy-sized, but his policy ignorance is a void that overspills the known universe. He’s the Wizard of Oz. When the bluster curtain falls down, what’s left is pathetic...

Instead, the party will veer on a course midway between outsider and establishment. It will probably end up with some hybrid candidate — sharp of tongue, gifted in self-expression and yet still anchored in the world of reality...

That’s where Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio come in. So far, Fiorina has looked like the most impressive candidate. She has a genius for creating signature moments. (“If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton’s.”) But her spotty record at Hewlett-Packard probably means she can’t start at the top of the ticket.

Dig this coo-coo diagnosis of Little Marco: 

Rubio is young and thus uncorrupted, and he is a genius at relating policy depth in a way that is personal. He has clarity of mind and can sum up a complex subject — Russia, the Middle East — in a way that is comprehensible but not oversimplified.

This debate was one moment in time, but you can see the vectors of where this campaign is headed. This is no longer Bob Dole’s or George H.W. Bush’s G.O.P. But it’s not going to completely lose its mind, either.

Narrator:  Brooks' Republican Party had, in fact, already completely lost its mind long ago.  

It’s going to be somewhat the same, but edgier and more renegade. Right now, Rubio, Fiorina and maybe Chris Christie are best positioned to occupy that space.

Sometimes the amount of money, time, energy and professional integrity that legacy media has been willing to burn through -- and is still burning through -- to keep people who wrong all along in the spotlight, and, as a corollary, the keep people who were inconveniently right all along the hell out of the  spotlight...takes my breath away.

Burn The Lifeboats

Lying Liars And The Shitheads Who Always Fall For Them

This "story" is currently being circulated on FaceBook.  Needless to say, it's all a pack of god damn lies. 

Like all such MAGA sucker bait, it's littered with all sorts of shiny garbage: unattributed quotes. leaks, whistleblowers, assertions of nonexistent evidence, and whispers of dark and terrible conspiracies lurking out there in the dark:

a bombshell discovery...

Elon Musk reportedly accessed an archived administrative interface...

...agitators hired to infiltrate and disrupt peaceful demonstrations. 

The “No Kings” protests, organized by a coalition of anti-authoritarian grassroots group...organizers now say the movement is being hijacked.

 According to leaked messages and whistleblower testimony...

...anonymous donors and shadowy intermediaries...

Security experts and movement leaders are sounding the alarm...

...said one protest coordinator, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons. “They want to frame Trump for the fallout, create a martyr, and fracture the movement from within.”

...a deeper question emerges: who benefits from destabilizing a democratic protest, and how far will they go to rewrite the narrative?

And even though it depends entirely on assertions of sleuthing by Elon Musk sheathed in a wad of computer doubletalk, there is no sign anywhere of any of it.  Not even on Elmo's own fascist shithole, where he has never shown any compunction about trafficking in all kinds of ridiculous lies.  

It was concocted by a wannabe Joe McCarthy allegedly named "Jonathan Gregory" who bills himself as "Digital Content Creator for the Trump Administration" and "@newsmax"?

The reason I'm posting this is because it is one of those events, like the birth of a star, that one rarely catches in its infancy.    We usually hear about the lies MAGA tells only after they've matured a little.  Gained a large enough following among the Garbage People  to be elevated to the status of NewsMax or Fox News fodder.  

But in this case, as Seaman Jones says in The Hunt For Red October, I'd say we hit a boomer coming out of the barn.   Because as of this writing, this bullshit exists in only two places where Google goes to look for things.

However, even though, as of this writing, this pack of lies has only been gestating for about eight hours, it has already found its way through the veins and capillaries of the Conservative media ecosystem and on to my local area social media, where it is being taken as gospel by area MAGA goofs.

Which is reason #87,454 why we here on the side of the angels really must stop deluding ourselves int believing that MAGA filth can be reasoned with, or in any way dealt with as sentient adult humans.   

I Am The Liberal Media.

And the Keynote Speaker at the Sangamon County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner This Year Is...

This guy.

Loves, loves, loves his warrior "brother" Whiskey Mango Hegseth.

What kind of guy is @PeteHegseth ? He’s the kind of guy that worked in an industry known for insecurity and undercutting your peers and decided to be the opposite.

From day one he could’ve looked at me as “another vet” trying to poach his opportunities, but without hesitation…

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) November 16, 2024

Loves, loves, loves Il Douche...

They said he was an unqualified and couldn’t do the the job.
They called him racist and a bigot.
They used salacious accusations that were proven false to attack his character.
They used his failed marriages to say his hates women.
They found a member of his family to use…

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) December 4, 2024

Despises Joe Biden...

If @JoeBiden threatened the Taliban the way he just threatened Americans who don’t want to wear a mask or get the vax he might have ended the war in Afghanistan.

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) September 9, 2021

You have disgraced our people and dishonored our sacrifice. You are a weak lying snake oil salesman and we see you. We see who you are now more than even. God have mercy on your soul, 50 years is a long time to lie, cheat and steal from your own people. @JoeBiden

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) August 31, 2021

And, just for fun, drops a big hint as to why Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney failed to flip Republican votes:

When you die OF OLD AGE you’ll be buried with Halliburton money. Your kids and grandkids will inherent Halliburton money. When you cry at night over means tweets, you’ll wipe your tears with Halliburton money. My friends in Arlington died earning Halliburton more money. https://t.co/m9lUJDOsgm

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) November 1, 2024

I'm sure he'll be a huge hit with the local meatheads.  After all, this is the big local Republican fundraiser, and donation and sponsorship options remain the same as last year when their keynote speaker was Trump's very own then-soon-to-be brownshirt deportation goon, Tom Homan.

The year before that the headliner was serial liar and David Plouffe's bestest podcast buddy, Kelleyanne Conway..

The year before that, it was Charlie Kirk, which I wrote about at the time.

And before Chuckles Kirk it was Candace Owens, which I also wrote about at the time

And before that it was Jason Chaffetz, one-time congressperson and Fox News troll who I believe now lives in Donald Trump's underwear drawer, which, yep, wrote about that one too.

The year before that it was Fox News in-house train-wreck/barfly,  Jeanine Pirro.  Wrote about that.

The year before that wingnut-network-job-hopper and H.R. Haldeman stunt-double, Corey Lewandowski.

The year before that, in 2016, it was none other than Fox News prime-time Gorgon and Keith Olbermann's former girlfriend, Laura Ingraham.
 
And on and on and on.

If you were ever curious about how we out here in the cornfields have been so consistently, dead-on accurate for decades with our predictions about the trajectory of the Republican Party, while our elite professional political media has been so repeatedly and catastrophically wrong about the GOP, it's really pretty simple.  Unlike our our elite professional political media, we actually live out here in the real world, chock-a-block with real Republicans who have never been shy about what they really believe.   

In fact, as I was writing up this obscenity last year, the Hugh Hewitt Show was playing on one of the two big radio station in the area.  He's on 9AM-12PM, Monday through Friday.  And if I didn't want to listen to Hewitt, I could always tune in to the other big radio station in the area where, at that moment, the Brian Kilmeade Show was playing.  He's on 9AM-11AM, Monday through Friday.  

Later in the day, on the first station, you get Sean Hannity followed by Mark Levin.  

Later in the day on the other station you get Dana Loesch followed by Erick Erickson 

The first station pads out it's weekend offerings with America First with Sebastian Gorka, The Larry Kudlow Show, Newsmax's own Chris Plante on the Chris Plante Show and, hilariously. The Weekend with Michael [Heckuva Job, Brownie] Brown.  Now that Gorka has been hired by the Trump regime to scare small children, I dunno is he's still on the air.

The second station takes its foot off the wingnut gas over the weekend with shows like American Family Farmer,  Let’s Talk Cosmetic Dentistry and The Jesus Christ Show, but it does find room late on Sunday night for Judge Jeanine Pirro.

This is the ambient radio environment out here in much of the real world -- the poison that Republicans out here in the real world are steeping in every day --  and it's been this way for going on 40 years now. 

And there is absolutely no fucking way to fail to notice it, unless your job as an elite political media professional is to deliberately fail to notice it.  

I Am The Liberal Media

 

 

Our New National Symbol

The Statue of Fealty.

Financed, built, installed and zealously defended by the Republican Party and its media collaborators.

Burn The Lifeboats

I Am So Confused

One hears a great deal these days about Democrats failing because we don't talk like "regular people".  

For example, here is John Fetterman being quoted by Fox News...which, in turn, is quoting The New York Times.  Which is all just super helpful.

Fetterman says Democrats lost male voters by being insulting, condescending

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., believes the Democratic Party has turned off male voters by being "insulting."

In a new interview with The New York Times, the lawmaker stated that liberals turned off male voters, who supported President-elect Donald Trump in droves. 

"Telling them that ‘I know better than you do,’ that’s not helpful," Fetterman said, characterizing what he saw as the party’s approach to courting men.

This genus of punditing is currently in vogue and to be found everywhere.  Like "Joe is too old!" and "But her emails" and 'Why won't Obama lead?" and "It's going to be Rubio!" and "Live, from this Ohio diner...", it's every two-bit opinion-haver's cheap and lazy way to fill column inches, but it leaves me very confuse.  So I'd appreciate it if someone would explain it to me.

Slowly.

Using little words.  

As if I were a Florida Republican.

First, well, this isn't really a question.  It's just that I can't help but notice how so many of the people hectoring non-specific "Democrat" and "Liberals" as being too snobby and condescending are themselves some of the most condescending humans extant.  Looking at you, panel of Mona Charen's "Beg to Differ" Bulwark podcast.  Looking at you, Ezra Klein, and the Time's op-ed page.  Looking at you, Pod Save kidz.  And Morning Joe has every flavor of condescension you could ever want.  The braying, talking-over-everyone condescension of Joey Scabs himself.  The mousy condescension of his sidekick.  And whole chorus of condescension from their regular panelists.

Second, I've also noticed how quickly you, John Fetterman, jumped from condemning "the Democratic party" to slagging nonspecific "liberals", and then back to "the party" again.  Put a pin in that: we'll get back to it.

Third, if arrogant and dismissive and outright repulsive language is so damn off-putting, John Fetterman, I gotta ask: have you ever actually heard how the Right talks about us America-hating, terrorist-loving, filthy, socialist, commie pedophile baby-killers?   Because it may surprise you!  Of course you may have missed it since they've only been talking about us this way, very openly, for the last 30-40 years.  

On the radio.  

On teevee. 

In print.  

On podcasts.  

Shall I go on?

So, fourth, why it's only condescending and off-putting when Democrats hit back?

Fifth, how is it every two-bit opinion-haver in Murrica is always very lavish condemning "the Democratic party"and/or "liberals" generally, but can never seem to get around to identifying any specific Democrat or liberal by name or title?   Who are these people, John Fetterman?  Where do they live?  What do they do for a living?  If you've got specific names and addresses, I'd be happy run over and tell them to cut it out.  Y'know, one condescending liberal to another?

Sixth and last, just exactly how does Slack Jawed Cletus from Sisterfuck, Arkansas know what the hell liberals are saying about him, or about anything, anyway?  Are there liberals with sound trucks rolling through the shitty, potholed streets of Sisterfuck, Arkansas, promiscuously shouting big words and smarty-pants phrases  like "epistemic" and "counterfactual" and "bounded rationality" and "disenthrall" just to make the locals feel stupid?  Are liberal women swarming the local pickup bars, quoting Bell Hooks and making fun of the male denizen's tiny penises? 

Or, as is 1000% more likely, Slack Jawed Cletus from Sisterfuck, Arkansas has never actually  encountered a real-life snooty, condescending liberal in the flesh.  But Cletus watches a lot of teevee.  NewsMax, mostly, with some Fox for Sean and Jesse and the hot ladies.  And when he's out on Cletus business, he listens to one of the three local station, all of which carry sports and Conservative talk.  

And all of the media Cletus has consumes all day long, every day, for decades, tells him that, out there somewhere, millions of uppity, condescending liberals are plotting against him and laughing at him behind his back.  

Cletus' media will include tiny snips of actual Democrats saying crazy, insulting things like "the 2020 election was not rigged" and "Donald Trump is a criminal" and "January 6th was an insurrection"  and "inflation is coming down" when everyone knows none of that is true!  And Cletus knows that everyone knows that none of this is true because all of it will be repeated over and over and over again, in different ways, on all the garbage propaganda Cletus gobbles up like Christmas ham.

Inevitably, the outraged bellowing from Sisterfuck, Arkansas will slop over into the legacy media and a fleet of Zeitgeist Media Action Vans will be dispatched from the East coast to interview a whole passel of Cletuses in a bunch of local diners.  From there, Cletus' down-to-earth, recited-by-rote wisdom will make its way into the comments of quotable, high-profile people who won't scold Cletus for being a dumbass who listens to liars, but will instead blame Democrats and liberals for being pompous and highfalutin.   

And the circle of life will once again be complete.

If you would like a blueprint of how this process works, including a complete list of materials and tools, just send $64 to the...  

Burn The Lifeboats Fund

Or you could just go here ("Joe Walsh and The Triumphant Return of Joey Tabula Rasa") to a post in which I wrote about a specific, traceable example of this phenomenon.  A fragment of a speech by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was taken wildly out of context by one conservative asshole.  It was passed upward through the Conservative media digestive system until it was allegedly overheard by one of Joe Walsh's many, nameless, imaginary just-plain-workin'-folk friends who, like Tom Friedman's many imaginary cab drivers, always just so happens to say exactly what Walsh wants to yell at Democrats about on any given day.

And on this particular day, Walsh transmogrified that entire daisy-chair of fiction, fake outrage and nonsense into yet another tirade about how out-of-touch Democrats are with the just plain regular American proletariats.  

In that post I break down that whole process, and you can go read it for yourself for free.  However, if you are inclined to send along $64 or more, I wouldn't think less of you.   

UPDATE:  Jim from the comments makes an important point.  When you consider the vast, empty expanse of all the things about which Cletus is dead-rat ignorant -- "Cletus doesn't know Trump is a convicted rapist. Cletus doesn't know Trump spent $160 million on NFL TV ads bashing TWO (that's right 2) trans prisoners who continued their transition treatments in prison following the TRUMP Administration's guidelines. Cletus also doesn't know Trump is convicted on 34 felony counts." and so forth -- how is it that Cletus doesn't know fuck all about anything, but is 100% for damn sure that some college professor out there at Hah-vahd spends all his days and nights cackling about Cletus not using the right pronouns.    

The Razors Are Moving

As longtime readers of this blog know, the easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to peruse their work for the Both Siderist "razor in the apple".

OK, to be 100% fair the truly easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to notice telltale signs like "Opinion columnist at The New York Times" or "host of Katy Tur Reports" or "Chris Cillizza" in their bio.  But the second easiest way to spot 'em is the quickscan their column or podcast or whatever to locate the inevitable Both Sides Do It"razor in the apple".  

If you look, you will almost always find it.  It's both a ritual and a contractual obligation.  Like the Introductory Rites and Concluding Rites of a traditional Catholic Mass, the absence of a Both Siderist razor in the apple would be the shocking aberration, not its presence.  

And, in the case of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times, for a while there I got to be eerily good at predicting what the subject of his next razor in the apple would be, and in which paragraph he would make that turn.  That I could do this magic trick -- predict the size, shape and subject of a Brooks column before it was published and tell you within a couple of column inches where he would inject the poison -- amazed my wife (no small thing) but, I think, also freaked her out a little.

But it wasn't really a magic trick.  It was just that Brooks is so utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, predictably banal.  Like the press and die of a metal stamping machine that spits out 1,000 screwdrivers an hour, or the filling heads of a bottling machine, the whole reason for the existence of creatures like Brooks is to reliably hammer home exactly the same bullshit over and over again, decade after decade.

And here I am going to borrow a line which Brother Charlie Pierce used in a different context in his excellent Esquire column today:

We’ve wandered into a deranged political version of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, in which we are warned:

“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”

Interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.

Yep.  That is indeed the pernicious labor of the professional Both Siderist, captured neatly in a phrase.

But I've noticed a change.  Interesting to me only, perhaps, but I've noticed that the Both Siderists seem to be burying their razors further and further down.  Even tacking it on to the tail end of whatever they're writing or saying as if, of yeah, I'm still required to tell this stupid lie aren't I?  So they toss it on the table practically as they're walking out the door.  I would speculate that it even feels like an act done with a sense of shame...but we all know that professional Both Siderists are untroubled by emotions like shame or guilt.

I'll give you two examples and you can judge for yourself.  Both from New York Times employees.  Both named "David".  One, a printed column, and the other, parting remarks on a podcast.

In The New York Times today, Mr. David Brooks opens his column by tripping over a fact that Liberals have been shouting about for decades

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.

That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.

In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics...

And as usual, we Liberals have warehouses full of receipts explaining in excruciating detail exactly how our country got to be this way.

Let me explain.  

No.  There is too much.  Let me summarize.

The deplorable state we are in is all down to David Brooks' former party -- the Republican Party -- which David Brooks swore in 2014 had "detoxified" itself, and David Brooks' conservative movement, which he has been swearing every few months since Christ was in short pants would be flowering into a full-on renaissance of awesomeness any minute now.

For more on this subject, try here: "In The Beginning..."

Brooks then takes his readers on a typical Brooksian "America: A Land of Contrasts" speed tour through the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

For example, the Settlement House movement, led by women like Jane Addams of Chicago...

moguls like J.P. Morgan...

Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller...

By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901...

Before finally arriving at the razor in the apple in the very past paragraph of this forgettable mishmash.

For a whole society to change, the people in the society have to want to change themselves. A smug, self-satisfied, “I am right” nation is going to be perennially stuck in place.

This is Brooks prescription for social change: everyone has to simultaneously agree to change all at once, and everyone [meaning Democrats] needs to stop going around claiming that we anti-fascists are right and that the fascists are wrong in that smug, self-satisfied way of ours. 

The other David is Mr. David French, also now of The New York Times, who had a long and not-particularly-interesting conversation with Mr. Tim Miller of the MSNBC Green room about...stuff.  Mostly about the intractability of the zombie Republican base.  About how creepy it is that absolutely nothing can or will budge them.  

Miller: It's just, to me, it's, like so obvious that if you see the Trump threat, like, why aren't there more of us?  Why are there so why are there so few of us? I guess that's my final question.  Do you do you have any clarity for me on that?

As you might imagine, I have many thoughts as to why this is so, which neither Mr. French nor Mr. Miller would want to hear, but that's not where we are going today.

So, as Miller and French are wrapping up, French is explaining that, as cynical as he is, he was surprised at the intensity of the backlash that was (and is) directed at him now that he has finally endorsed Kamala Harris (you may remember that French was one of those whiny Republican hard-cases who pissed away their vote in 2016 and 2020 by voting third-party.)

Which would have been an excellent place to stop.  

But Both Siderist can't stop, can they?  They have this kind of compulsive false-equivalence logorrhea 

And so...

French:  And I think Tim what we constantly underestimate, just because it's kind of hard to wrap our minds around, animosity at the level of intensity that we see.  We constantly underestimate the raw animosity that exists on the Republican side for Democrats and by the way on the Democratic side for Republicans.

Yes, even before Trump, French says, Both Sides hated each other.  

So where did all that anger on Both Sides come from?

French says, three or four times, that it's "negative polarization" which is defined as:

Whereas traditional partisanship involves supporting the policy positions of one's own party, its negative counterpart in turn means opposing those positions of a disliked party.

There's is not even a passing acknowledgment of the decades of labor men like David French poured into turning the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags whose reflexive response to the word "Democrat" is "Marxist!Commie!Socialist!Monster!"

Or, as Never Trumper Hero #1 Liz Cheney was describing us until about five minutes ago, baby-murdering filth who are "the face of pure evil":

Instead of correctly diagnosing what the fuck happened to the Republican party as the end product of a decades-long Republican campaign of calculated, premeditated and well-funded demonization of Democrats -- and Democratic reacting to the rise of this American fascist party by despising fascists as any patriot should -- French whisks all that inconvenient history away with the magic conjure words "negative polarization" which is a mysterious thing that apparently just happens.  You know, like an ill-timed fart at a funeral or the like the description of the wind from John, 3:8

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.

The Both Siderist razors on the apples are shifting location, kids.

But they are most definitely still there. 

I Am The Liberal Media

Even Stranger Wine: The Late Stage Teevee Brain

This is an excerpt from my late friend Harlan Ellison's introduction to his book Strange Wine: 

Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look so Terrific Yourself.

I used to know Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. He was a wise and a kind man, and there are tens of dozens of people I would much rather see dead than Dan. One time, around lunch-break at Paramount, when I was goofing off on writing a treatment for a Joe Levine film that never got made, and Dan was resting his ass from some dumb horsey number he'd been reshooting all morning, we sat on the steps of the weathered saloon that probably in no way resembled any saloon that had ever existed in Virginia City, Nevada, and we talked about reality versus fantasy. The reality of getting up at five in the morning to get to the studio in time for makeup call and the reality of how bloody much FICA tax they took out of our paychecks and the reality of one of his kids being down with something or other . . . and the fantasy of not being Dan Blocker, but of being Hoss Cartwright.

And he told me a scary story. He laughed about it, but it was the laugh of butchers in a slaughterhouse who have to swing the mauls that brain the beeves; who then go home to wash the stink out of their hair from the spattering.

He told me–and he said this happened all the time, not just in isolated cases–that he had been approached by a little old woman during one of his personal appearances at a rodeo, and the woman had said to him, dead seriously, "Now listen to me, Hoss: when you go home tonight, I want you to tell your daddy, Ben, to get rid of that Chinee fella who cooks for you all. What you need is to get yourself a good woman in there can cook up some decent food for you and your family."

So Dan said to her, very politely (because he was one of the most courteous people I've ever met), "Excuse me, ma'am, but my name is Dan Blocker. Hoss is just the character I play. When I go home I'll be going to my house in Los Angeles and my wife and children will be waiting."

And she went right on, just a bit affronted because she knew all that, what was the matter with him, did he think she was simple or something, "Yes, I know . . . but when you go back to the Ponderosa, you just tell your daddy Ben that I said . . . "

For her, fantasy and reality were one and the same...

Bonanza ran from September 12, 1959, to January 16, 1973.   That's 14 seasons and 431 episodes; the second longest running Western television series in U.S. network history.  It was also the first Western series televised in living color.  So, this conversation probably happened sometime in the mid- or late-1960s.   Back when teevee was still a magic box that brought you Three!Count!'Em!Three! networks to choose from.  When color teevee was still a rarity.  When Blocker would come into your home as Hoss Cartwright every week, year after year.   

You would have known who Hoss was and what he was about.

Another part of your brain would have also known who Walter Cronkite was and what he was about. He was serious. The news mattered. And however addled you might get, you'd never have mixed up the news of the day with life on the Ponderosa.  But somehow, through the magic of teevee, sometimes some element of that fictional drama on teevee would get to feeling familiar and real.  Especially if it was part of an ongoing drama that you spent time with over and over again for years.

Even though a part of that teevee brain knew it wasn't, it seemed like it was 

This was a principle theme of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.  

Mildred kicked at a book. “Books aren’t people. You read and I look around, but there isn’t anybody! . . . Now. . . my “family” is people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh! And the colours!”

 

The "family" she's referring to is the television program that's playing all day, every day on the walls of her "parlor".

Back to Ellison:

There was a woman who had the part of a home-wrecker on a daytime soap opera. One day as she was coming out of Lord & Taylor in New York, a viewer began bashing her with an umbrella, calling her filthy names and insisting she should leave that nice man and his wife alone!

One time during a college lecture, I idly mentioned that I had actually thought up all the words Leonard Nimoy had spoken as Mr. Spock on the sole Star Trek segment I had written; and a young man leaped up in the audience, in tears, and began screaming that I was a liar. He actually thought the actors were living those roles as they came across the tube.

The teevee brain is still with us, but in some incredibly toxic ways it has changed.  It has evolved to deal with 300 channels instead of three, and in the process, the teevee brain has, in a way, reversed the flow of credulity.  

Today, teevee viewers are used to seeing the same actor play many different parts in many different places.  No one is trying to arrest Bryan Cranston for cooking meth or Idris Elba for running a Baltimore drug empire, because [spoiler] A) both of the characters they played died in-series, and B) both actors (especially Elba) are well known for a variety of other standout roles.  

Similarly there is no confusion over who Julia Louis-Dreyfus is.  Or Edie Falco.  Or Danny DeVito.  They are talented professionals, who can put on a costume and inhabit a role that makes us laugh or cry or both. What we feel while we are being entertained is real, but by now the teevee brain knows that the actors are not the characters.  They're playing a part, and then they'll move on to the next part.  Different costume, different character, different feelings.  Then they'll move on once again.  Maybe a movie this time.  Maybe the stage.  

What the teevee brain now processes coming through the magic box is an overwhelming, kaleidoscopic tsunami of comedies, dramas, biopics, animation, docudramas, reality teevee, politics, westerns, news, science fiction, reruns, ancient aliens, cooking shows, bitchy housewives, wealth porn, porn porn, all stitched together with a million ads for better sex, sad dogs, happy dogs, eczema cures, floppy penis cures, baldness cures and Little Pills with Big Stories to Tell.

It's all just teevee.  

And the teevee brain has learned to expect performers to go from one role to the next, just as the sports brain has learned to expect that today's heel who pitches or QBs for our rival, might be tomorrow's hero when he's traded to our team and performs his miracles for us.  We'll cheer them when they play the hero, and boo them when they play the villain, but there are no world-ending stakes because it's all a game.  All just teevee.  And when they come through the magic box, the teevee brain accepts them for who they are now, not for who they were in their last series or when they wore a different number on their jersey.  

As I said, the teevee brain has reversed the flow of credulity: it now values how the performance makes it feel over whether or not the performance is strictly "real".

And the teevee brain doesn't care whether the person on the screen right now has ever been in anything else.  It is impossible to imagine watching, say, this season of Fargo with someone who rolls their eyes at Juno Temple's amazing performance because, "Who's she trying to fool?  Everybody knows that's Keely Whatshername from Ted Lasso.  I mean, she's not even American?!?  And OMG, that guy's not a sheriff.  That's Don Draper!" 

Now hold that thought in your mind while considering this story, which, if you're of a certain age, you might remember as making national news 26 years ago:

This is during the same period when when television networks began demanding that news division start showing a profit.  

From Nieman Reports, a quarter of a century ago:

The Transformation of Network News

How Profitability Has Moved Networks Out of Hard News

Twenty years ago, there was no network news “business.” The Big Three broadcast television networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—all covered news, but none generally made money doing so. Nor did they expect to turn a profit from news programming. They presented news programming for the prestige it would bring to their network, to satisfy the public-service requirements of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, and more broadly so that they would be seen as good corporate citizens.

Back then, the networks earned enough money from entertainment programming that they could afford to run their news operations at a loss. And so they did. Former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb recalls Owner and Chairman William Paley instructing news reporters at a meeting in the early 1960’s that they shouldn’t be concerned about costs. “I have Jack Benny to make money,” he told them.

It is no exaggeration to say that just about everything has changed since then. Today, ABC, CBS and NBC operate in a competitive environment in which most viewers have dozens of channels from which to choose. That has transformed not just TV news but the entire television industry. Those most severely threatened by the way the broadcast business operates are the Big Three. The ABC and CBS networks (now subsumed into larger corporate structures) are losing money, according to Wall Street analysts. NBC’s network profits are also falling sharply. Those who own these networks—Disney (ABC), CBS Inc. with its major stockholder, Mel Karmazin, and General Electric (NBC)—all demand that their news operations make money...

So that's what was happening to the news.  And it's no secret when the line separating "actor/entertainer" and "politician" began to collapse:

Conservative media figured this out the minute Reagan and his henchmen killed the Fairness Doctrine.  Radio and teevee were powerful tools for making listeners and viewers feel something, and that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh and all his imitators, and Fox News and all their imitators sold their customers.  Feelings.  

While Democrats were out there trying to sell policy solutions to actual problems,  Fox News was selling its customers rage and thinly-veiled racism.  Paranoia.  Patriotism.  Moral superiority.  Sexual arousal.  The vindictive joy of making Liberals cry.  And because the consumers of Conserative media were also the base of the Republican party, the language of Republican politics quickly became indistinguishable from the language of Fox News and Hate Radio. 

From The New York Times, December 12, 1994:

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

...The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November.

Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research organizations.

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

At this point the trajectory was clear.  As traditional news networks became more and more focused on entertaining and soothing their viewers rather than alienating them with information that made them uncomfortable, the Republican party devolved further and further into a for-profit division of Conservative Media, Inc. incorporated.  

Tony Snow could go from having his own show on Fox News and being the primary guest host of Rush Limbaugh's radio program, to being George W. Bush's press secretary and no one said "boo".

Karl Rove could go from being "Bush's Brain" in the White House ...  to Wall Street Journal contributor and Fox News political analyst ... to advisor to Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign, without breaking stride.  

And as the language that brought the Republican customers into the tent and kept them there -- the language of  rage, racism and paranoia -- was amped up and up and up, the mainstream media kept increasing the dosage of the anesthetizing language it uses to hang onto its customers.  Over and over again, mainstream news customers are told that there is nothing to be alarmed about.  That whatever noise you might be hearing on the Right, it's just a kooky fringe, which is loud but mostly harmless, and just as loud and just as mostly harmless as the kooky fringe on the Left.  And you all are safe from all that mishegoss here beneath the sheltering bower of the Sensible Center.

And anyway, it's all just teevee.  There's nothing dangerous going on here.  No need to raise an alarm.  It's just actors changing costumes.  Everyone knows the four walls of our democracy are solid and eternal.  Everyone know the inerrant, Capraesque wisdom of the American people will always kick in during the third act and save the day, so nothing really really bad can happen here.  Things might get weird every now and then, but the stakes aren't really real life or death, so remain calm and keep shopping.  

And this dynamic goes on and on until we arrive at a place where the entire Republican party can go very publicly insane and plunge right off the cliff into out-and-out fascism...while the Great Middle of America still can't decide whether to go with Biden or Trump, because aren't both parties pretty much the same?

Never doubt that the people at the helms of the media corporations and the political party that brought us to this precipice began this project decades ago with very definite agendas in mind.  Eliminating taxes on the wealthy.  Deregulating everything.  Gutting social programs.  And for the leaders of  Conservative Media Inc., turning the Republican base into a zombie army of reprogrammable meatbags who would believe any nonsense that was shit into their skulls as long as it made them feel righteous or furious or giddy began as nothing more as a means to those ends.  

But now -- as we on the Left warned them over and over again would happen -- the leaders of  Conservative Media Inc. have lost control of the monster they made.  Now, feeding the insatiable, junkie-hunger of that rage-drunk mob has become an end in itself.  It's either feed the monster, or lose your seat in congress.  

Feed the monster, or watch your audience share drop as the mob finds someone else to tell them what they want to hear.  

Feed the monster, or they'll come for your family.   From The Washington Post:

The role of violent threats in Trump’s GOP reign, according to Republicans

Tim Alberta is out with his latest must-read this week — a profile of freshman Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.). Meijer joined Congress just days before the Capitol insurrection and almost immediately jeopardized his political career by supporting Donald Trump’s impeachment

It’s a must-read, but a tough read. That’s because it describes an exceedingly ugly situation: one in which lawmakers are disregarding private principle in their votes and often doing so out of literal fear. Not only does Meijer describe members who advocated for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office later voting against impeachment, but he cites fears of physical violence directly impacting such votes...

This is the late stage teevee brain of the MAGA mob.  Completely immune to facts.  Lost to reason.  Unmoored from their own past.   Moved to action entirely by the ganglia-twitching trigger-words they get from the magic box.  

Meanwhile, bathed in the soothing, narcotic hum of Both Siderism, the late stage teevee brain of the mainstream media customer is barely aware that any of this is happening.  And if it is, well it can't possibly be as bad as all that...because...uh...Both Sides Both Sides Both Sides.

And finally, let's not forget that late stage teevee brain is what makes it possible for "liberal" MSNBC to run a full-time reputation laundromat for a whole menagerie of current and recently-former Republican scumbags.  For example, does anyone doubt that, sooner or later, Steve Schmidt's old friend Nicole Wallace will find a way to get his mendacious, grifting ass readmitted yet again into the circle of the Heroes of the Resistance?  Just like she has already done?   Twice?

Remember, Schmidt was the GOP mercenary that put Sarah Palin into our lives.

Boo!

But then he Came to Jebus and started calling Trump a poopy head on MSNBC, and almost as one, Liberals on social media threw themselves at him like a drunk prom date.  

Yay!

He loves us!  He says all these beautiful things that no one else says!  OMG, let me get my checkbook and how much should I make it out for?

And my oh my didn't these same credulous dopes loudly and angrily scold those few of us that could not fucking believe they were falling for this guy.

Then he threw all those pretty words out the window for a Howard Schultz payday.

Boo!  

He said he loved us?  How could he have betrayed us like that?  

But Howard Schultz show eventually closed down and once again Steve Schmidt found himself "at liberty" as the vaudevillians used to say.  

And so, once more through the MSNBC Reputation Rehab Laundry and...he's back baby!  

Yay!

Spinning all those beautiful words.  Saying things that no one else has the guts to say!  OMG, do you prefer Venmo or PayPal!!

And once again, I'm over here in my little corner of the internet wondering how the hell are these otherwise intelligent mopes falling for this con man again?

Then Schmidt threw all those pretty words out the window for a Dean Philips payday.

Boo!  

He said he loved us?  How could he have betrayed us like this?

Schmidt could do this, because Shmidt understands late stage teevee brain.  He was a performer, playing the role of Hero of the Resistance.  The pay was good.  The hours were good.  The reviews were good.  Then he got offered a better part as Howard Schultz's political consultant.  Six weeks.  No heavy lifting.  And when that show closed, Schmidt changed back into his Hero of the Resistance costume at MSNBC.

And the late stage teevee brain was willing to go along with it because, really, it's just teevee.  So whatever parts he had played before in any other teevee drama, what did that matter?  At that moment Steve Schmidt was giving the audience the feels it craved, and that's all that mattered.

You can go right down the line at CNN and at MSNBC and watch this happening.  Joe Scarborough. Bill Kristol.  Matthew Dowd.  Michael Steele, who will now be given his own weekend show.   Liz Cheney was a performer who worked for the political division of Conservative Media, Inc. and when she played that part she repeated the horrifying, unforgivable lies about Democrats.  

Now Cheney is this month's hot property on the not-Fox News cable news and book circuit, and she's playing that part by spilling the beans about what went on behind closed door while she was the third most powerful person in the GOP.

This is why it doesn't really surprised me when I see someone like Chris Cuomo saying trash like this:

Chris Cuomo: “I don’t think there’s any greater risk to America with [Trump] than with Biden."

I didn't realize Chris Cuomo is such a moron. A second Trump term would be 1000 times worse than the first. pic.twitter.com/uVL7pzGO3Y

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 1, 2023

Cuomo is a media creature and he understands the various species of late stage teevee brain.  He knows that, in the long run, whatever outrageous garbage he spews today to hang into the spotlight a minute longer, it won't be a barrier to being welcomed back into the media insider club tomorrow.  A change of costume and a new script and he'll be right back in the good graces of enough credulous chumps to make it worth his while.  

After all, it's just teevee.

I Am The Liberal Media

Don’t Quote Me on This, but There May Be Something Funny Going On With Fox News

Every mainstream media outlet reacting to text messages confirming (for the umpteenth time) that Fox News really is the vile, conspiracy mongering, fascist shithole --

-- the Left has always said it is.

This video is from 16 years ago, talking about Fox News as it had already existed for the decade before that.

Alert Reader Mark thinks this 2009 vivisection of Fox by Jon Stewart takes the belt.  It might be.  

By the way and for the record, 2009 was ... let's see now ... carry the one ... 14 years ago.

No Fair Remembering Stuff

It Took Decades of Work and Billion of Dollars --

-- to cultivate a political base that are not only reliably meatbag-stupid enough to believe shit like this --

-- and dismiss facts like this --

The chart every Democrat should be using on a daily basis--real wages after passage of Tax Reform Act of 1986. pic.twitter.com/QirmFddwkK

— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) November 2, 2017

-- but are so willfully meatbag-stupid that they will obediently ignore the rubble of one Republican catastrophe after another and the stinking carcass of one old, debunked bold-face Fox News/Hate Radio lie after another while happily flitting on to the new ridiculous, bold-face Fox News/Hate Radio lie...

...and then to the next..and to the next...and to the next...believing the same liars over and over again...year after year year...

So if you still cling to the fantasy that this mob's rampage through our democracy can be stopped with sweet reason and by waving facts around you have completely missed the point of the the last 25 years. 

In fact, the plan to create this mob of reprogrammable meatbags worked so well that the latest generation of barely-literate Conservative propagandists no longer need to strain their limited vocabularies and room temp IQs to make up new, batshit crazy conspiracies to keep the base distracted.

These days can just haul any old, long-debunked slander out of storage (from the NYT, June, 2005)

Rove Criticizes Liberals on 9/11

...

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."

...

Mr. Rove also said American armed forces overseas were in more jeopardy as a result of remarks last week by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who compared American mistreatment of detainees to the acts of "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others."

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Mr. Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

...

-- slop it into the Conservative News Puke Funnel (today, from future Fox News tell-all pop-up book author Tomi Lahren) --

Liberals will tell you feelings are more important than national security. Enough. https://t.co/gH2f5qUKmN

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) November 2, 2017

-- and the base will line up twelve deep to gorge themselves.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Knockin' On Satan's Door

Mama take this badge from me

I can't use it anymore

It's getting dark too dark to see

Feels like I'm knockin' on Satan's door..

One more Villager insider suddenly notices shit Liberals have been saying all along.

From The Washington Post:

This Harvard study is a powerful indictment of the media’s role in Donald Trump’s rise

By Chris Cillizza June 14 at 3:04 PM

I've written repeatedly — and self-righteously — about my belief that  ascribing the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican primary race to media complicity is ridiculous. And I believed every word.

But, a new study by Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University casts serious doubts on my position as it documents not only the outsized coverage Trump received — from TV and digital media — in the early days of his campaign but also how overwhelmingly positive that coverage was.

Let's go through a few of the most important findings from the study, which is based on "an analysis of thousands of news statements by CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post" during 2015...

Let's not, shall we?  Because we here on the dirty, disreputable Left all fucking well know where this is going...

First comes the weakest "we-uh"culpa the WaPo lawyers will allow.

It's hard for me to look at the Shorenstein Center study and conclude anything other than that the media played a larger role in the rise of Trump than I previously believed.

Then comes every disclaimer in the toy box:

What I won't say is that we — as a media collective or The Washington Post in particular — let Trump off easy. We didn't. We wrote lots and lots of items digging into his proposals...

And I totally reject the various conspiracy theories about Trump's press coverage — the most common of which comes from Republicans and goes like this: "You guys handed Trump the nomination because you knew he'd be the easiest one for Hillary Clinton to beat."

Why did Trump get an outsized level of attention for someone in his polling place at the start of the race? A few things:

1. His celebrity. He is the first genuine celebrity of our reality TV age to run for president...

2. His approach. Journalists are biased in favor of good stories and quotable candidates...

3. His rise. The media may have helped Trump get off the ground. But once it became clear he was moving up, he became the story in a way that any fast-mover — Howard Dean in 2004, Mike Huckabee in 2008, etc. — does...

Followed by the grudging, obligatory promise to do better next time. Maybe even join up with David Brooks, drivin; around the country, solvin' journalism crimes and havin' adventures!  In the Journalism Mystery Machine! Which never seems to actually make it out of the driveway!

Still. For those of you who screamed when I wrote that the media bore no culpability in Trump's rise, you had it right. I'll try to do better next time.

Meanwhile, several pages away in the same publication, life-long Republican and writer of opinions, Kathleen Parker, is shocked!shocked! that Republican presidential nominee Donald Caligula Trump would stoop to demonizing the media!

First, we haul the by-now-well-worn fainting couch to the center of the stage and position it just right to show Ms. Parker's good side...

...
While Clinton spoke against anti-Muslim rhetoric, Trump leapt into the darkness with all four feet, snarling at President Obama’s lack of passion in addressing the Orlando slaughter and condemning him for refusing to use the words “radical Islamic terrorism” in identifying the enemy.

These charges are familiar enough, but this time Trump went a step further, suggesting that Obama resign from office and, conspiratorially, that there’s more going on than we know. Defaulting to his customary template, Trump shifted responsibility for these thoughts to “people.”

“Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said Monday on Fox News.

“And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”

And who are these people who can’t believe “it”? Trump’s Twitter followers? The tiny voices in his head?...

Oh!  Oh!  I know!  Call on me!  "These people", Ms. Parker, are the base of your fucking party. There are millions and millions of them.  They are bigoted and irredeemably stupid and they have very openly been calling this president an unAmerican traitor who pals around with terrorists since before he took the oath of office:

In fact, it is so weird that you don't seem to know who "these people" are because a whole bunch of these very people ate you alive eight years ago when you suggested that, just maybe, calling the president-elect an unAmerican traitor was just a wee bit beyond the pale (from Firedoglake)

Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts

By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008

Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."

Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:

...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

I'm truly speechless...

Ms. Parker has lived by this particular sword a good long time,  Helped forge it.  Honed it.  Made a career wielding it with a fearsome glee.

Now she cannot fucking fathom why her newspaper is being stabbed with it by the Republican nominee for president of the United States.

Now everybody be quiet -- cell phones off and no flash photography -- because Ms. Parkers Big Moment is here.

...
In a normal world, Trump would be booed off the stage. Instead, he is applauded (by some) for adding The Post to his list of journalistic organs denied access to his campaign.

The applause is disheartening, and is evidence that newspapers are little understood or appreciated. This is owing in part to a few notorious fabricators, who were duly punished, as well as a vast array of alternative news sources. But mostly to blame for the demonization of the media broadly are faux news media outlets, Republicans and their cohorts.

For decades now, conservative news sources, many of which are aggregators dependent upon the mainstream media for their bread and butter, have joined radio hosts in blasting traditional news sources. Kill the messenger is their operating principle. Republicans who benefit from this portrayal of the media tender their silence in errant gratitude...

And with a dramatic "thump". Ms. Parker hits the fainting couch like a pro and, like Blue Texan eight years ago, I am speechless.

When Ms. Parker says "faux news", she means Fox News -- an entire, multi-billion dollar Conservative media empire built explicitly around "killing the messenger" and calling people like me a traitor, all day, every day.

When she says "their cohorts" she means the entire, enabling Beltway establishment who rolled over for the GOP strategy of working the refs long ago:

And when she says "Republicans" she means people like Ms. Kathleen Parker.

Because demonizing the media as a tool of the Sekrit Liberal Conspiracy to Destroy Murrica has been the central pillar of Republican white grievance politics since Mr. Parker was in diapers, rubbing strained carrots in her hair.  It was a fully-operational GOP mainstay when William Safire was teaching Spiro Agnew how to say "Nattering nabobs of negativism" and when a young Pat Buchanan was just a barefoot lad, sittin' by the creek, reading "A Child's Golden Book Of Aryan Master Race Theory" and dreaming his big dreams.

And yet only now that Donald Trump has pulled this ancient and filthy sword from the wingnut stone and been declared the King Of All Teabaggers by overwhelming acclamation has Ms. Parker deigned to notice how far into darkness she and the rest of her cohorts have led us:

Mama put my pens in the ground

I shouldn't use them anymore

That cold black cloud is comin' down

Feels like I'm knockin' on Satan's door...