Professional Left Podcast Episode 939: Huckleberry Finn And The Sins Of MAGA

“All right, then, I'll go to Hell!" -- Huckleberry Finn

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The Return of the Night of the Long Knaves

Last year, while Donald Trump's Pussy Grabber Express was gearing up to destroy --

...the deepest bench [Republican] had in decades. Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, counts some 26 potential candidates: “John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Pete King, Mike Pence, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, Joe Scarborough, Scott Walker, and Allen West … Dick Cheney, Tom Cotton, Mitch Daniels, Joni Ernst, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani.”

-- and all the Beltway's Very Serious People were laughing up their sleeves the very idea of a Trump candidacy, certain Liberals internet dregs were noticing that Il Douche was successfully flummoxing the Beltway Big Brains by deploying exactly same deflection-by-ratings tactics Fox News used to get around the touchy subject of Bill O'Reilly being a lying sack of shit.

In case you weren't yet born, back in early '15 I think it was, Fox News was having a fine old time pounding the shit out of Brian Williams for telling a few lies.   They were relentless, taking that High Dudgeon-Vator all the way to the penthouse and dropping refrigerators on him, until, at last, the pressure they generated became untenable and Williams was forced to quit.

But there was a small hitch.

One of Roger Ailes' top earners -- a blotchy, Irish liar and rage-monster named Bill O'Reilly -- had also been caught red-handed telling several whoppers of his own, which certainly could have made Fox News look like towering hypocrites and gradually humiliated them into sacking Bill-O the Clown if anyone on the left were capable of the kind of single-minded, full-bore, take-no-prisoners siege that is Fox News' stock-in-trade.

Sadly, other than a few stabs at it by the Kindly Doctor Maddow and several more stabs at it by powerless internet nobodies, no such siege was ever mounted and, as such, Ailes knew all he had to do was dig in, give no quarter, and eventually it would all blow over and everyone would agree to forget it.  Here is what I wrote at the time:

But eventually Bill O'Reilly being a notorious liar and douchebag stopped being a thing.  And the sad part was, lots of us disreputable Liberals knew this fight was over before it had begun because Fox News has a very clearly established protocol for dealing with people who attack their on-air celebrities:

1. Double down and insist that you are 100% blameless.
2. Mercilessly attack the reporter(s) who raise the issue.
3. I was joking!  Can't you pussies take a fucking joke?
4. Double down again and demand that they owe you an apology.
5. Brag about your ratings, because on teevee those are the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong.

And it worked, because of course it worked.  Because time and again Fox News has shown it will hunker down forever and never give an inch in defense of its on-air thugs and trollops (from CNN Money, February 2015) -- 

Bill O'Reilly has 'full support' from Fox News chief

With its biggest star facing damaging allegations, Fox News is putting up a united front.

A spokeswoman said network executives are in Bill O'Reilly's corner, in a statement to several media outlets.

"Fox News Chairman and C.E.O. Roger Ailes and all senior management are in full support of Bill O'Reilly," the spokeswoman said.

Fox News did not respond to CNNMoney's requests for comment.

O'Reilly, the top rated host in cable news, has been forced to defend himself since Thursday, when a report from Mother Jones cast doubt on claims he has made about his time covering the Falklands War for CBS News in 1982. At the time, O'Reilly and his CBS News colleagues were based in Buenos Aires -- far from the Falkland Islands, where most of the fighting took place.

...

-- while MSNBC has shown time and again is lacks both the guts and the strategic interest necessary to engage in siege warfare with the orcs.  Hell, MSNBC prexy Phil Griffin already cedes three hours a day, every day, to a Fox News Lite punk named Joe Scarborough, so why should anyone who works there believe for one second that Griffin will have their back if they go after the Ailes Borg Collective itself?

And so, right on schedule, the Billo-The-Liar story crawled under the porch and died.  leaving Mr. O'Reilly free to go on the Letterman show and declare himself fully vindicated and then get back to the important work of pandering to racists, slandering Planned Parenthood and encouraging the mentally unstable to murder abortion providers. 

I pointed out at the time that in the first Republican primary debate, Donald Trump was succeeding by deploying exactly the same tactics...

...because Donald Trump is not only a Fox News veteran but the living embodiment of the average Fox News viewer's id, he knows that there is a very clearly established protocol for dealing with people who attack highly-rated on-air celebrities:

1. Double down and insist that you are 100% blameless.
2. Mercilessly attack the reporter(s) who raise the issue.
3. I was joking!  Can't you pussies take a fucking joke?
4. Double down again and demand that they owe you an apology.
5. Brag about your ratings, because on teevee those are the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong.

And it's working, because of course it's working.  Because Fox News has spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars training the Pig People to automatically rally to the defense of any bombastic Fox News asshole with high ratings who says he being unfairly attacked and invokes this protocol. 

Which brings us to Fox News Sunday this week, where this little gem caught my eye.

Once again, Donald Trump finds himself cornered by a very inconvenient truth:

CHRIS WALLACE:  According to The Washington Post, the CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the election to help you win the presidency.  Your reaction?

Once again, he deflects by accusing his accusers:

DONALD TRUMP, R-PRESIDENT-ELECT:  I think it's ridiculous.  I think it's just another excuse.  I don't believe it.  I don't know why, and I think it's just -- you know, they talked about all sorts of things.  Every week, it's another excuse. ... 

And once again, he bellows about his awesome fucking numbers.

DONALD TRUMP, R-PRESIDENT-ELECT: ...We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College. I guess the final numbers are now at 306. She's down to a very low number.

And once again, the Pig People will sop it up with a biscuit and ask for seconds.

See, Fox News and Hate Radio have not revolutionized politics so much as they have debased the noble art of lying.  You see, like Mark Twain, I believe in...

...the Lie, as a Virtue, A Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. 

My complaint is that, by dumbing the Republican base down to the level of farm animals who are simply too stupid to realize when obvious and incompetent liars piss in their faces and razor out their pockets over and over again, Fox News and Hate Radio have debased this subtle and ancient art possibly beyond repair.  Twain again:

No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.

Damn straight, Mark old friend.  

Damn straight.

Michael Steele's Literary Offenses*

By now, everyone knows that Michael Steele -- the Party of Old White Men's delightfully buffoonish "See? We're not bigots!" codpiece -- does not know the difference between a Very Famous 19th Century English Novel and The Most Famous Russian Novel Ever Written.

Less well-reported are his responses to the "Literature, Talent and Piety" portion of the Righteous Conservative Christian Americans for Prosperity and Freedom vetting form he had to fill out when they discovered that he had once tried to head-fake his way into the United States Senate by pretending to be a Democrat:

Section Six: General Literary Knowledge

Q: Favorite part of any Shakespeare comedy?
A: When Macbeth busts out with "It's a cookbook!"

Q: Best surprise ending of a great modern work?
A: The end of "Atlas Shrugged", when it turns out that he was really back on Earth the whole time.

Q: Best scary ending?
A: When Oliver Twist finds out that Soylent Green is really people. Still gives me chills!

Q: Best existential question ever posed?
A: Easy. "100 Years of Solitude" when that guy says "Are you a Mexican or a Mexi-can't?"

Q: Best use of rhymed couplets.
A: Think you're clever, tryin' to sneak some more Shakespeare in the back way, but you can't fool Michael Steele. It's Hamlet, Act 9, Scene 32. "This is my rifle; this is my gun/ This is for fighting; this is for fun."

Q: Best last line?
A: 1984 -- "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."

Q: Favorite book of the Bible?
A: Gotta be Luke. Especially the part where Darth Vader says "Luke, I am your faaaather!" Loved that shit.

Q: What famous book begins with the line, "Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."
A: "Decision Points".

O brave new world!
That has such cretins in't!

*(Of course I stole it, but "where I steal I leave my knife".)

The Original Fisker

He will make a sammich of your soul.

David Fucking Brooks’ column yesterday was just plain, shark-jumpingly godawful amazing.

No other way to put it.

Usually the self-loathing and fury come wrapped in soft, pastel batting and tied up in a word-string bow about Edmund Burke or behavioral psychology. but yesterday it all came off in one, long, whining, splenetic, passive-aggressive mess.

A wreck apparently banged out in some kind of feverish Benzedrine and Dulcolax rage that has something to do with Liberals and Dr. Faustus.

Or maybe it was Bobo’s considered opinion -- launched from deep inside his gated, Beltway life in Bethesda -- as to why Liberals don’t understanding Missouri.

Or maybe it was about imaginary Moderates who live in a place called the “suburbs” that – after eight straight years of deficit catatonia – are suddenly shrieking mad about the fact that America is broke.

Whatever the theme was supposed to be, it came pooping out as a long, strange, disassociative mental breakdown captured in ink in which “people” (as opposed to “Liberals”) loathe their “gummint” even though -- for reasons left glaringly unexplained -- their fury is about eight years too late and pointed in exactly the wrong direction. Also left flamboyantly unmentioned is the possible effect that having virtually everyone in David Fucking Brooks’ political movement spending the last 30 years jumping up and down in front of every teevee camera and microphone they could commandeer (or that Rupert Murdoch would buy for them) screaming that the Big Gummint is a Commie Plot to “KIIIIILLLLLL YOOOOUUUU!!!!”…might have had on public opinion.

This is one of the many, many, many things Bobo did not have time to delve into during his 800-word shillippic , preferring instead to steep in the bile of the protagonist’s jilted, bitter I-told-you-so best friend;

(See, “Perkins, Elizabeth” in “About Last Night”.)
(See also, “Belushi, Jim” in “About Last Night”.)
(See also, “Strickland, KaDee” in “Fever Pitch”)


Or if those are a little low falutin' for your liberal, elitist, Missouri-hatin' Faustian tastes, have a little slice of Iago from "Othello" and note the eerie snugness with which it fits the relationship between the "reasonable” Conservative New York Times columnist and the President of the United States into whose confidence that columnist brags he has been taken many times:

The Moor is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will tenderly by led by th'nose...

And in that voice Bobo crooned his column; the stage-whispered soliloquy of the false friend who secretly wagers against you and takes a corrosive delight in your failures because your fall will vindicate his view of the world as a crooked and vile place.

The words of a man stomping hard on the fingers of a nation hanging on for dear life so that he can feel smug about the mercilessness of gravity.

Or maybe he’s saying something about why Liberals don’t understand Arkansas.

Beyond that, I don’t much care today. Today, for a host of reasons, taking out the boning knife and giving Bobo’s words a full fisking seems pointless in the face of the knowledge that tomorrow…and next week…and next month…Mr. Brooks will abide: his movements through the world – his bad ideas and crappy words -- utterly untroubled by any, bloggy water balloons thrown against the shiny rims of the Great Villager Machine in which he rides.

It is at times like these that rebuttal from so far below seems so puny and weak.

Which is why, at times like these, I am grateful to have the masters to lean on.

To remind me that, every once in a while someone comes along who gets a good, solid, funny, righteous literary beatdown so fucking right that it can last forever:

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

by Mark Twain

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