This is a written reprise of some of the stuff we covered on this week's
episode of The Professional Left podcast. It happens sometimes. I
get on some subject, start outlining it for a post, then comes podcasting
time, and what I'm writing about is current, interesting and top-of-mind, so
it makes its way into the show.
My understanding is that Sophocles did this all the time on his podcast.
So...
Of all the things that can and have been said about MSNBC, one thing remains
clear. There is absolutely no fucking shortage of current and
recently-former Republicans on that small, leaky lifeboat. They
Republicans them coming and going and waiting in the green room or in the
comfort of their camera-ready living room, just waiting for their turn to tell
Democrats how we should be running their party.
And given all the recent layoffs at NBC, you might have have thought, well,
they even though they have no ethical qualms about colonizing their network
with Republicans, they have obviously reached some kind of financial boundary
on their Republican shopping spree and now there's just had no more money in
the "Put More Republicans On The Air" jar. But you'd have been
wrong. The ransacked the sofa cushion in Cesar Conde's office and what'd
ya know! They found they had just enough skrilla to wedge in one more
GOP douchebag into their lineup.
Ronna McDaniel.
But for reasons other than financial, she proved to be just one, wafer-thin
Republican too many and it all went *boom*.
But despite all of this supersaturation of NBC/MSNBC with so many current and
recently-former Republicans that you'd think there is
just no more room for even one more, Ari Melber managed to find space
for not one but two Republicans, who are each, in their own right, the worst kinds of insufferable scumbags.
Karl Rove and Reince Priebus.
Here's the video, which you are under no obligation whatsoever to watch.
Allow me to interpret. Rove makes it clear that he does
not want a "Democrat" president, but that Trump's embrace of
January 6th "thugs" makes him problematic as well. However, being
a completely amoral creature, Rove frames Trump's depravity as merely
tactical. A campaign problem, not an existential threat. That this
is the fault of Trump's campaign staff being unable to manage Trump's public
behavior better. That Trump would have been smarter if he had done this
or that.
Next up was Rinse Pubis who appeared to be both drunk and bitter, with a real,
Wrath of Khan, "No, you can't escape!" vibe.
However, some of what he said was 100% right.
Not the stuff about about
"the independent voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina". That's all bullshit, because those aren't "independent" voters.
Because for all practical purposes, there are no independent
voters. It's just the Tea Party scam all over again. "Independent"
voters are just Republicans who don't want to take any shit for being horrible
human beings.
However what he says about "this is not the 1990s electorate" is quite
correct. And what the panel never got to -- and what Ari Melber never
asked -- was, well, why is the 2024 electorate completely different
than the 1990s electorate?
What changed?
Because that is a subject that current and recently-former Republicans dare
not discuss, and teevee goofs like Melber will not pursue. But
over here in what remains of the Liberal blogosphere we are under no such
corporate restrictions on our lines of inquiry. In fact, all need to do
is dare to remember the past. Simply look at the public record and answer
the question,“What happened to the Republican party over the last 40 years?”
Lee Atwater happened. Rush Limbaugh and Hate Radio happened.
Newt Gingrich happened. Mitch McConnell happened. Michael Steele
happened. Fox News happened. Glenn Beck happened. The Fake
Tea Party happened. George W. Bush happened. Dick Cheney
happened. Tom DeLay happened. The Federalist Society
happened. The whole, multi-billion dollar infrastructure of Citizens
United enabled think tanks and SuperPACS, and media spinoffs and book
deals and National Review cruises and white nationalist evangelicals
happened.
It is a long and ugly list, all of it aided and abetted by a complicit mainstream media.
And that guy up there on stage bleating about how awful and uncivil the MAGA
thugs are? Karl Rove? He happened.
Because the reason those “thugs” that Rove is so troubled by attacked the
capitol on January 6th is because they believed what a lying Republican
scumbag named Donald Trump told them. That Democrats had stolen the
election. That the diabolical Liberal conspiracy that secretly ruled
everything had colluded to rob them of their democracy.
So then the question becomes, how did the Republican base ever come to
believe such nonsense? Believe that Democrats were devils, so
monstrously evil, well organized and ruthlessly efficient that we could and would do
such a thing?
Because that is exactly what men like Karl Rove told them. Over
and over again. For decades. This was Rove in 2005:
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.
14 years later, in 2019, here is Hero of the Resistance, Liz Cheney,
calmly calling Democrats baby murdering monsters. The "face of pure
evil".
For decades, lying about Democrats is the most horrific terms has been the
everyday vocabulary of Right. They have been steeping in this filth
for decades, so is it any surprise that they had no trouble believing that
those vile, terrorist-loving, baby-murdering Democrats would steal an
election?
But what about all the election court cases Trump lost? All the
so-called election fraud evidence that proved to be nonsense? All of
the wild election conspiracy theories that came to nothing? Who taught
these people to simply ignore inconvenient reality?
This is a quote from journalist Ron Suskind’s 2004 article in the
New York Times Magazine. The source is widely believed to have
been Karl Rove:
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based
community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's
not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do'.
This is what happened to the electorate of the
1990s.
This kind of fascist propaganda, echoed by every Conservative media platform
over and over again for decades by propagandists like Rove and Priebus, is
what happened.
And this is where that relentless and well-funded tidal wave of lies and conspiracy mongering has taken them:
Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine, who rules on election disputes: “Do you really think the Democrats are gonna roll over and let Trump be president again? You think they’re just gonna go away, all of a sudden find Jesus and be an honest election?” pic.twitter.com/1mh35KDjDJ
Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. “We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!” As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the belli-
cosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking.
...to slander his opposition in the most despicable way possible (from The New York Times, June 24, 2005):
Mr. Rove made the comments at a fund-raiser in Manhattan on Wednesday, saying: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and 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."
...it is always helpful when he pops back into the headlines saying typical Karl Rove-shit:
Karl Rove's a corrupt, discredited ex-G.W. Bush political dirty trickster who idolized Nixon & engineered character assassination of Dems & liberals.
Rove instigated smear campaign against John Kerry in 2004 by getting Swift Boat sailors to lie about Kerry's service record. https://t.co/AsO4OpECYi
Because one of the most consistent gravitational forces at play since the election of President Stupid has been the persistent, hypnotic mantra which Never Trumpers repeat over and over again that "Trump is a freak occurrence. Trump not a real Republican." And in the face of that well-funded, media-enabled, memory-killing narcotic drone, Rove arrives like a hot cup of coffee to the face --
-- reminding the sleepwalkers that the modern GOP has always been monstrous.
That they have always been Roves all the way down.
A long assembly-line of Conservative miners, smelters, cutters, assemblers, welders and polishers stretching back through Fox and Rove and Bush, through Falwell and Weyrich, through Atwater and Limbaugh, through Reagan and Nixon, though Wallace and Thurmond...all playing with the awful tools of paranoia, rage, white supremacy and faith...all scavenging the barking mad remnants of the Confederacy and the Jesusland dreams of Christopaths to forge for themselves a mighty machine.
A mighty, angry, crazy, bigoted reactionary electoral beast fed on drivel and dung and led by the nose from cause to cause and candidate to candidate, getting a stronger and wilder and more anxious to spit out the bit and run amok every day.
They were warned.
Yes they were.
They were warned -- by Liberals -- as far back as the 1960s that they were tampering with terrible forces (from me, five years ago):
From Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the (then very right-wing) Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind:
…
What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.
We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct.
…
“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”
In conjunction with the civil rights movement, Johnson overcame southern resistance and convinced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed most forms of racial segregation. Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. Legend has it that, as he put down his pen, Johnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation," anticipating a coming backlash from Southern whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
-- and has been sliding deeper into the septic tank ever since.
They were warned, but they did it anyway. Kept mollifying thugs. Kept flattering bigots. Kept slaughtering science to appease the theocrats and the garden-variety stoopid. Kept whispering to the stone crazy that their paranoia was patriotic. And, of course, kept on dehumanizing and demonizing patriotic, reality-based Liberals who were trying their damnedest to keep their Pretty Hate Machine from rolling back the whole Enlightenment. Kept doing it all -- louder and louder and louder -- long after it was clear that their cause was a catastrophe and their followers were insane. And now, once again, they want to bury the evidence of their crime: hammer the monster they created into a sarcophagus and hope to Heaven that their enablers in the Beltway Media can once again be relied on to cover their tracks. Except... Except... Except for two generations their Grand Batshit Strategy hinged entirely on encouraging their Uruk-hai to be loud and proud about their ignorance, their casual racism, their screeching aggrieved rage and their myriad hilarious derangements. And however hard the Conservative Money Caste tries to bury their bastards under a million yards of sweet, amnesiac dirt, they ain't going back into the cold, cold ground:
To say that [professional radio hatemonger] Mark Levin is unimpressed with Karl Rove’s latest project would be an understatement. Levin kicked off the broadcasting week by issuing a clarion call to his listeners (FREE audio): “Who the hell died and made Karl Rove queen for the day? And his sidekick, Steven Law, with their disastrous records?
“I want to invite as many people as possible to join the voices and forces of liberty; that’s what we are, that’s what we believe in,” Levin continued. “Not the forces of defeat in the Republican Party. Not the forces of big government and back room deals and crony capitalism; illustrative of Karl Rove and Steven Law and the whole cabal that is the Republican establishment.
“These people need a hard, swift kick in the a– off the public stage,” Levin concluded.
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.
“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—1 dared not speak! And now—to-night—Ethelred—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
...
They built this.
We told them not to, over and over again, but they did it anyway. Yes they did.
Is this infant (pictured here in an Exclusive! Fox News artists' sketch) actually Herman Cain's long rumored out-of-wedlock-white-rape-baby?
Will "Baby Deepdish" (as he has been nicknamed by some Beltway wags) come forward to confirm the shocking Herman-Cain-out-of-wedlock-white-rape-baby rumors?
Stay tuned to Fox News for more details on this developing story.
Cain says Rove attacking his campaign to help Romney By Justin Sink - 10/24/11 05:10 PM ET
Presidential candidate Herman Cain hit back at Karl Rove's criticism of his campaign Monday, saying the former adviser to ex-President George W. Bush was deliberately attacking him for being a non-traditional Republican candidate. Cain also said he believed that Rove wanted rival Mitt Romney to earn the Republican nomination.
"It's a good thing the voters are not looking at Karl Rove's little whiteboard," Cain told The Washington Examiner. "I believe it is a deliberate attempt to damage me because I am not, quote unquote, the establishment choice. But why not go with the choice that the people seem to like?"
Rove, in an appearance Monday morning on Fox News, used a a whiteboard to list a number of Cain's gaffes that could hurt his campaign, including his comments last week on abortion that raised eyebrows among some conservatives, his Afghan and Palestinian foreign policy positions, and statements in an interview that he was unfamiliar with the neoconservative moment. ...
Meanwhile, in what another deep-background spokesman for Rove's shadowy, democracy-killing, crackpot-billionaire-funded Deadly Viper Assassination Squad insists is also an unrelated story, unnamed insiders speaking on condition of anonymity have begun to wonder if the reason Herman Cain refuses to address the rumors of his out-of-wedlock white baby might have something to do with his misleading, flip-floppy "answer" to the question of whether rape victims should be forcibly compelled to bear the out-of-wedlock children of their rapists.
It is also rumored that Karl Rove's employer -- Fox News -- will faithfully "report the controversy" of these shocking! shocking! allegations...
...24 hours a day...
...seven days a week...
...until Herman Cain either takes their offer or is reduced to a smudge on Roger Ailes' carpet.
Happily what it really amounted to was Amanpour running a few minutes of interviews she had done, which was followed by extended reportage from North Korea (where the occasion of the Dropping of the Political Balls of the Son of the Dear Leader [The Littlest Kim] was apparently cause for a massive parade. Talk about performance anxiety...), which was followed by a longish interview with former Pakistan strong man/president Pervez Musharraf.
Granted, to mollify her expecting-a-smackdown-audience Amanpour made him wear a huge turban, called him "The Beast of Islamabad" and hit him over the head with a folding chair, but still, C+ for effort.
Elsewhere, the same, old shadow-puppet rituals played themselves out in the same, old sour-tasting ways.
Karl "For some reason still not in prison" Rove manifested himself on “Fox News as a "master strategist" and hectoring the President for doing stuff that dishonors the office and is "beyond the pale"...
Jokeline (having just completed a trip though a narrow band of suburban archipelagos) and the Magic Dolphin Lady (having apparently just completed a weekend of deep meditation with a copy of "Kings Row" and a crate of box-wine) showed up on "Meet the Press" to maunder on about "Real Americans"...
The usual, slung onto America's plates cold and flat and fuck-you-eat-it-style.
And so, instead of wasting one more minute today recapitulating this week's ritual sacrifice of real public discourse to the gods of Beltway Wisdom, a little bait-and-switch of my own that came powerfully to mind as I watched Karl Rove wag his finger at me lecture me on morality and public duty.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.
The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.
Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’Liberal Scum/Kenyan Usurper/Commie Traitor collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.
Rove bashes O’Donnell; O’Donnell supporter at victory party strikes back; NRSC cuts and runs
I just finished watching Karl Rove trashing GOP Senate primary winner Christine O’Donnell. It was on Sean Hannity’s FNC show. Might as well have been Olbermann on MSNBC. The establishment Beltway strategist couldn’t even bother with an obligatory word of congratulations for O’Donnell. He criticized her “character” and “rectitude” and claimed she hadn’t answered questions about her financial woes. She did so here. Rove mocked her security concerns as “nutty.” Yet, her concerns have been more than justified. See here (second video clip).
Rove came across as an effete sore loser instead of the supposedly brilliant and grounded GOP strategist that he’s supposed to be. Expect more Washington Republicans to start sounding like Tea Party-bashing libs as their entrenched incumbent friends go down. ...
Of course, this particular vintage of bile has been a staple at the Malkin blog for a long while. Her critique of Rove is essentially that, during the Age of Bush, Don Karleone was a pussy for not letting the Right's rabid crapweasels completely off their leashes (as demonstrated here, where Malkin seconds fellow Gorgon Ann Coulter's whining about how Poor Ol' Dubya's unnecessarily slim margin of victor in 2004 deprived her of her beauty sleep):
The truth? It’s much, much closer to Ann Coulter’s analysis last week, which was striking in its candor about Rove’s keep-the-social-conservatives-at-arm’s length strategy:
Of course, we could have done it a lot earlier on election night but for “Boy Genius” Karl Rove. It’s absurd that the election was as close as it was. The nation is at war, Bush is a magnificent wartime leader, and the night before the election we didn’t know if a liberal tax-and-spend, Vietnam War-protesting senator from Massachusetts would beat him.
If Rove is “the architect” — as Bush called him in his acceptance speech — then he is the architect of high TV ratings, not a Republican victory. By keeping the race so tight, Rove ensured that a race that should have been a runaway Bush victory would not be over until the wee hours of the morning.
As we now know, the most important issue to voters was not terrorism, but moral values. Marriage amendments won by lopsided majorities in all 11 states where they were on the ballot. Even in Oregon, the state targeted by gay marriage advocates as their best shot of defeating a marriage amendment, the amendment passed by 57 percent — a figure noticeable for being larger than the percentage of votes cast for Bush in Oregon. In the great state of Mississippi, the marriage amendment passed with 88 percent of the vote. ...
But Rove concluded Bush should stay mum on gay marriage and partial-birth abortion — contravening the politicians’ rule of thumb: Talk about your positions that are wildly popular with voters. “Boy Genius” Rove decided Bush shouldn’t even run radio ads on gay marriage, and at the last minute, Bush started claiming he was in favor of civil unions, just like John Kerry.
Well they're off the leash now and running wild, so I can only assume that Malkin and Coulter are the two happiest strap-chewers in all of wingnut Bedlam.
There once were two cats of Kilkenny Each thought there was one cat too many So they fought and they fit And they scratched and they bit 'Til (excepting their nails And the tips of their tails) Instead of two cats there weren't any!
Despite what you may have heard, in no way did Karl Rove “lose it” or “melt down” Sunday. Instead, he simply deployed for political advantage a tactic with which every public transit rider has long been familiar: strategic craziness. To wit, making such an unbearably loud, shrieking nuisance of oneself on the train or bus that everyone will leave you the Hell alone rather than risk a rabies bite or shiv in the kidney.
And, as every pub trans rider also knows, there are only a few ways of dealing with the situation without bloodshed.
You can whip out your “Minority Report” .44 Frenum puffgun...
(I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six gusts or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this CGI I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Frenum, the most powerful puffgun in the world, and would blow your shirt clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?)
Or, if you think you’re The One
you can take it outside...
Or, if you have one handy,
you can throw a Vulcan at the problem.
But what you don’t do with a yammering shitwhistle is put him on-camera, unchaperoned, in front of millions of people.
Unless of course you’re ABC, and you got skunked last week when Fox News Contributor and Unindicted War Criminal Karl Rove zipped through the express interview lane over at rival NBC to pimp his new book and speed-lie through 240 seconds of Tom Brokaw’s slow-ball interviewing.
And speaking of NBC, the unctuous David Gregory was back from his Rove-Avoidance-Vacation this week on “Meet the Press” meting out what, in the Fluffyland locker-room, I’m sure he describes as ruthless verbal beat-downs administered to anyone who dares to step into his house and lie to the American people.
Of course, what he did in fact was piddle around with House Republican Leader Rep. John Boehner and House Democratic Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer for awhile, pausing only long enough to bust out the occasional LOLCAT to make some stupid point or another.
Boehner: The President gave many speeches. Despite that, Republicans are still assholes. Therefore we should kill the bill.
David Gregory: Here’s a cute LOLCAT that sums up everything better than I can.
Boehner Oooh! Oooh! Lookit the Kitteh! It will be so sad for them when the Evil Gummint takes over of the Health Care system with munnies stolen – stolen! – from Medicare!
Hoyer: This is such bullshit.
Boehner And then ruins our economy.
Hoyer: Double bullshit.
Boehner: It is a Gummint Takeover! It is! It is!
Gregory: What about the mobs of teabaggers who are chanting Republican-trademarked anti-gummint slogans, while they spit on Congressmen and call them fags and n*ggers?
Boehner: I would like to take a moment away from trying to claw my way into the teabagger’s pants to emphasize that these are few, isolated incidents. And that we’ve got the best health care system in the world.
Hoyer: The tone of the debate has been driven into the sewer by douchbags like this guy sitting next to me.
Boehner: Fluffy, make him stop swearing in front of the L-O-L-C-A-T.
Gregory: There is a cost for inaction. (Reads likely doomsday scenario of doing nothing).
Boehner: There’s nobody in Washington that’s talking about inaction. Greatest health care system in the world! Gummint takeover! Danger! Danger!
Boehner: Never have we made such a big decision on partisan lines.
Really? Because it sure seems like I can remember one or two or three or eleven times when the Dregs of Dixie have tried to kick over the checkerboard rather the play nice with the hated Yankee/Negro/Liberal/Feminist/Hippie/Union/Gay/Whatever aggressors.
Saturday night, outlining the likely course the Mouse Circus would take, I noted to myself that Christiane Amanpour would apparently be starring in the pilot episode of the "Amanpour and the Six White Guys" Show.
Turns out I got a couple of things wrong.
First, it ended up being Nine White Guys: six scheduled and in real time, Mitch McConnell on tape, and Republican Eric Cantor and Democrat John Larson tacked on at the last minute to round out some face-time quota.
Also there was no Christiane Amanpour on the Christiane Amanpour Show: Despite a week of advertising her Triumphant Ascension at the last minute they plugged in Generic White Guy to host this mess.
So...Ten White Guys.
A Deciwhitey.
Also last night, as I paced to and fro in front of the Great Castle 3DBB
carefully flowcharting out every possible combination and permutation of what might happen, I also assumed, in the main, things would unfold like so:
Karl Rove and David Plouffe would have a dork-off about ward-level micro-political-marketing and process while carefully avoiding mentioning the fact that Rove should really be doing this interview on Skype from the exercise pen of the ADX Florence federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
George Will would not avoid mentioning Herbert Hoover since every good Conservative knows that it was Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression. The filthy class-traitor.
Sam Donaldson would avoid moving his head violently enough dislodge what appears to be a hirsute flounder glued to the top of his skull.
So imagine my surprise when, as my eyes slowly adjusted to the Mighty Caucasian Glare blasting out of my teevee set, I caught a glimpse of what I initially took to be a nature film of a grubworm fighting with a matchbook.
With the Lords of Acid’s “I Must Increase My Bust”
for a soundtrack for some reason (Not safe for work).
Turns out it was Karl Rove, playing it all shoutycrackers and pointing frantically at a little white board.
Plouffe: I think…
Rove: Economic disaster!
Plouffe: Could I…
Rove: Destroy America!
Plouffe: If I could just get a word…
Rove: Doc fix! Doc fix! Doc fix!
Plouffe: Politics is about comparisons…
Rove: Touch my monkey! Love it!
Plouffe: Look, the fact of the matter is…
Rove: George W. Bush was the greatest President in American history!
Plouffe: Here are the actual…
Rove: Move On dot Org! Democrats bribing people. Violating federal law.
Plouffe: Karl Rove also said that the stimulus program was a failure. But in truth, the economy has grown by…
Rove: Gummint jobs! Those are all gummint jobs!
Rove absolutelywould not shut the fuck up while Plouffe kept on smiling and looking to the Ineffectual Host for some hint that he was going to referee.
Of course, the hosts of the Mouse Circus aren’t referees at all. They’re fight promoters, doing for politics exactly what Don King used to do for boxing. And the uglier and bloodier things get, the better their corporate masters like it.
Ineffectual Host Who We Will Never See Again: People think the process is fucked up. And as anyone who listens to this conversation could see, it kinda is. Isn’t it President Obama’s fault that Karl Rove is a lying shitbag?
Rove: Yes. The fact that the GOP has spent an entire year obstructing every single thing the Kenyan Usurper is trying to do is absolutely Obama’s fault. I’d also like to take this opportunity to dump another wheelbarrow of meaningless Frank Luntz-certified fear-words into the middle of this pig fight: Kabuki! Aloof! Distant! Detached! Bernie Maddoff!
Plouffe: If Republicans want to run on this, maybe they want to break out that awesome fucking “Mission Accomplished” banner again.
Rove: That banner was to honor the men and women who served on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Why does David Plouffe hate our troops?
On close observation, Rove’s red-faced, bulldozing act here reminded me of his softer, slower, labyrinthine, word-parsing turn on “Fresh Air”, in that (as was noted on Friday’s Driftglass and Bluegal Podcast ) Rove’s specialty is calibrating his lie-delivery-system to exploit the bad habits of the host of whatever program he gets booked on.
On the more temperate medium of “Fresh Air” radio, he used endless parsing wordplay to dupe Terry Gross into chasing her tail until every question was a meaningless gruel of vowels and consonants on which he imposed his own interpretation, and then gave long, winding answers to his own questions.
On the more aggressive medium of Mouse Circus teevee, four important factors worked heavily in favor of Rove getting away with his ranting and blustering virtually unchallanged:
1. A weak and inept substitute teacher was running the show.
2. A numbers-geek opponent who was clearly unprepared to deal with a crazy person, and who kept looking to the weak and inept substitute teacher to regain control over the situation.
3. Rove was off-site, making it impossible to use traditional kinds of physical interaction (arm grab, pointing, leaning in, etc.) to change the rhythm of the exchange.
4. Job security. Rove can say and do whatever he fucking well pleases and still have a happy home to go back to at Fox.
The minute it was permitted to become a pig fight, the King of the Pig People was going to win it.
Finally, some of the more interesting exchanges took place on the down-market ”The Chris Matthews Show”, where Matthews was honest enough to ask the question:
How come Republicans aren’t paying any price for blocking everything?
Good question.
Michele Norris: Because Obama never framed it that way.
Good answer. Incomplete, but correct.
Also Michael Duffy was candid enough to mention that, when he talks to Republicans off the record, they say they’re not ready to govern. That they don’t want to actually run anything. Sure, they’re more that willing to lead the pitchfork-and-torches mobs and burn the country down for partisan gain, but privately they’ll admit their leaders suck, they have no ideas, and they really don’t disagree on the basic stuff Obama is trying to do.
In other words, they’re just scumbags, and among the pig-ignorant Confederate dregs left sloshing around at the bottom of the Republican Barrel, there is absolutely no downside to being that kind of !Hulk!Smash! scumbag.
Howard Fineman laid out one of the less visible but very real consequences to the GOP’s strategy of just blocking everything: there are now a couple of hundred critical appointments in the pipeline and the fact the Senate won’t act on them is really gumming up the works.
Matthews: Why?
Fineman: Because any Senator can hold up anything for any reason. And a bunch of Senators – mostly Republican, but some Democrats – have decided to do just that.
First, this is a situation that has been going on for a long, long time
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) announced Monday evening that he will support a Republican-led filibuster over President Barack Obama's nominee to serve on the National Labor Relations Board.
The move is likely to infuriate labor groups who have fought hard for Craig Becker's nomination to serve on the five-member NLRB - and will likely give Republicans enough support to sustain a filibuster Tuesday. ...
Nelson, a conservative Democrat up for reelection in 2012, has seen his approval ratings drop sharply since he lent his support for Obama's health care bill in December and secured deals for Nebraska's Medicaid payments. ...
...the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.
It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson — whom Mr. Gingrich considers a failed president — pushed Medicare through over the howls of conservatives.
And let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.” ...
From torpedoing Administration nominations en masse, to whipping the Pig People into ever higher states of frenzy, the goal of the Republican Party has always been simple and has never changed: To cripple, bankrupt, lie, terrorize and by any other means necessary render the United States of America ungovernable.
And then whine their way back to power complaining about how mean everyone is and how nothing gets done.
From the aggregated wisdom of the Mouse Circus (Rove dividing his lying time between Brokaw on MTP and Wallace on "Fox News Sunday") I learned that Karl Rove never, ever used the GWOT as a partisan, political weapon, which means we all just imagined this speech.
Karl Rove believes that negative campaigning -- "throwing mudballs" -- just never works and backfires on the candidate, which is why he has never done it. So I assume a letter of apology to Mr. Rove from John McCain's "black baby" will be dropped in the mail any time now.
As everyone in the world expected, Rove sat there and lied and lied and until he had run out the clock. Lied about the reasons for going to Iraq. Lied about his own, well-documented past. Told great whopping big lies about Bush administration policies that we’re fact-checkable within seconds.
And when not lying outright, he simply deflected every question with a smirk and another question.
If asked about “Cheney”, the answer was “Kerry.” If asked about “Fox News” the answer was “MSNBC.”
Because that’s what sociopaths do, and by Rovian standards it was a triumph.
And Wallace (Fox) has been a lost cause since forever.
But Tom Brokaw (who the good people at General Electric saw fit to disinter from the NBC Studio Tour Waxworks to conduct an interview what was eventually pared down to the length of a ShamWow commercial) had famously said in 2008 that he believed “Meet the Press” was:
"...a big heartland broadcast. It’s where the rest of the nation tunes in to find out what’s going on in the nation’s capital. And it’s not a salon. And Tim was successful at it because he was Everyman to everybody out there and they felt that he represented their sensibilities in a lot of ways. And that he would hold people accountable the way they seemed not to be held accountable by the rest of the Washington press corps, which I think in the eyes of so many people is just one cozy little high school cafeteria.”
By that standard, I would have expected Karl Rove to be brought on and sweated under the hot lights (waterboarded if necessary, seeing as how it’s not torture) until, presumably, he began to talk about his sleazy past as Chief Republican Ratfucker, how he and his bosses lied baldly and continuously to the American people about virtually every subject for eight years, about how he and his bosses very nearly wrecked the country, and how very, very sorry he was for being such and awful shit of a human being.
By that standard, I would have assumed this would be the general outline of things because, after all, why in the wide, wide world of sports would anyone ever again put this ambulatory sack of Rovine spongiform encephalopathy ™ on teevee if it were not to induce him to humbly beg the forgiveness of the civilized world?
By that standard, I set my popcorn maker to “Smackdown”, settled in for 30 solid minutes of motherfucking, smashmouth, steel-cage, non-high-school-cafeteria accountability-holding, bitches, and hoped against hope for something resembling an accountability session for all the sins Rove had accumulate in his filthy tenure as Lord Mayor of the Republican sewer.
And by that standard -- by his own standard -- Tom Brokaw could hardly have embarrassed himself more thoroughly if he’d crapped his pants and sat in his own poo for six minutes, gaping at the camera and muttering about dirty hippies.
Rove then toddled off to be "interviewed" at his home base on Fox News, where much peppermint foot cream was applied to his aching hooves, leaving David Brooks and Tom Friedman to occupy at the same table that Rove had just vacated.
It was like a thousand tiny neocon fingers urging you to let go.
Tom Brokaw then fawningly read aloud from Brooks' Friday column (about which I was somewhat less fawning here) and Brooks allowed as how he agreed with everything he himself had written.
Elsewhere, Lindsay Graham said that he thought that Reconciliation was some kind of evil trick.
Also Graham is absolutely sure here are plenty of Republicans who want to work with Obama if he would just bend over a little further.
Although can't seem to remember any of their names.
UPDATE: I wanted to open this post back up for one more minute to underscore exactly why the interplay between Rove and Wallace on the specific subject of Karl Rove's partisan used of 9/11 and the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT )was so singularly reprehensible.
WALLACE: This gets to one of the central complaints about you and your time in the White House, and that is that you helped — and you address this in the book — that you helped destroy the political unity in this country after 9/11.
In January of 2002, just two months after the attack, you were speaking to a big GOP conference of GOP leaders, and you said the following, "We can go to the American people on the issue of winning this war. They trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might."
At a time when the president was talking about how united the country was, was it a wise idea to turn the war on terror into a partisan issue?
ROVE: I wasn't suggesting a partisan issue. I was suggesting Republicans talk about what they were for. And that's what politics ought to be mostly about, is what are the two parties or what are two candidates in a race for? And I wanted...
WALLACE: But when you say we're going to go to the American people on the issue of winning the war...
ROVE: Talk about our support for the war, talk about...
WALLACE: But does it not sound as if — and we're talking about the war on terror now, not the Iraq war. The implication seems to be that the Democrats somehow weren't...
ROVE: Well, look. When Democrats say they're for health care, does by implication that mean Republicans aren't? No. It means Democrats are for health care, and it is up to the Republicans to go out there and say, "We're for health care reform and here's what we would do."
And I would say (inaudible) speech to the Republican National Committee in saying be focused on what we are for and go out and tell the American people what it is.
And look. There are a lot of things that Republicans did in the — in the — in those months that were absolutely vital to the security of our country. And we ought to be proud about our record and talk about it.
Notice what Wallace does here to help his Fox News Colleague Karl Rove weasel around the truth: he broaches the general subject of whether or not Rove deliberately turned the worst tragedy in modern America into a partisan issue for political gain -- a claim for which there is a mountain of damning proof -- but chose to present as evidence of Rove's behavior to only a snip from a despicable but relatively innocuous (by Rove's gutter standards) speech he made in 2002.
A speech that, in the hands of a genuine journalist and not one of Rupert Murdoch's bought-and-paid-for messenger boys, could still have been used to raise welts on Rove's oily hide. Instead, safe at home inside the Fox News mother-ship, Rove was lobbed a slow pitch softball, which he smirked into the outfield and then moved on to blaming Democrats and unions for making 9/11 into a partisan issue.
So millions of dumbass Fox Viewers could shamble back to their life-long political stupors, confirmed in their belief that that poor Fox News Contributor Karl Rove was just another victim of evil, liberal lies.
So sad.
Of course, if Wallace were a real journalist and not one of Rupert Murdoch's bought-and-paid-for messenger boys, the speech he would have referenced to make his point was this one from 2005
where, speaking as the chief adviser to the President of the United States during a time of war, he said this:
"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.
And this:
"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."
This was the speech that everyone on the Left remembers.
This was the speech that had normally flaccid Democratic governors and Senators finally saying Enough with this Douchbag already. That was printed in every newspaper and burned up every blog.
This was the speech that had the Pig People up on their hind legs squealing in bilious ecstasy as one more of their ugly little nightmares got pinned on the Dirty Fucking Hippies by the GOP's Ratfucker-in-Chief.
This was the absolutely consistent pattern of The Rove Presidency from its sleazy beginning to its cataclysmic end; to cover up one catastrophic failure after another by injecting as much raw poison into the body politic as the needle would hold...and calling it Governing.
And so naturally, this was the speech that Wallace never bothered to mention.
And how did Brokaw handle the same subject?
By not mentioning.
In any way.
At all.
And since as America's Leading Journalists take turns "interviewing" Karl Rove about his years in power it becomes stunningly obvious that as completely incapable of or unwilling to remember what America was really like just five short years ago during the peak of Don Karleone's thugocracy, I thought a timely reprint from the late Steve Gilliard reporting from the thick of it was most definitely in order.
Because we experienced his incompetence up close and person. We knew this guy was full of shit, absolutely full of fucking shit, after they started to play games with the funding and gave Wyoming terrorism money. We knew he was an assclown then.
We thought DC 9/11 was a comedy, because the Bush we saw hid in AF One like the scared bitch that he is.
But did you listen?
Fuck no. Until last week, Ann Coulter was calling New Yorkers cowards for not endorsing Bush's folly in Iraq.
We have been screaming for two years that Bush and his team sucked. That they had no clue. They sent soldiers to be wounded in Iraq without armored anything. And you idiots cheered him on from the safety of your keyboards. We told you he was fucking up Iraq. But no, we supported Saddam, we were racist, we blamed America.
You say this isn't about politics? Fuck you, this IS politics, real time, real life politics, where the insanity of all your ideas are exposed to the world for the fraud that they are. Tax cuts kill. Ask the relatives of the dead of the Gulf Coast.
Well, motherfuckers, the alligators are feasting on dead nigger and there isn't an Iraqi in sight. And Bush is trying to gladhand his way through a mess which has stunned FOX reporters. I mean, Shepard Smith is calling Fox's talking heads liars ON THE AIR.
CNN rips Bush in print and online after nearly five years of sleep.
Instead of hearing what we had to say about Bush, you called John Kerry a coward, mocked Max Cleland, blamed everything but herpes on Bill Clinton. You enabled Bush into this mess and now you're shocked?
Now, Fox can be outraged, now, Wash Times and Union Leader call Bush weak? Well, his coward ass disappeared in 2001. But you rather blame Michael Moore for that.
He can't even explain the Iraq war to a grieving mother.
So what did you do?
Write the most vile things about her and her dead son. Attacked her patriotism and her honesty.
Well, motherfuckers, and that means you, fat ass Goldberg and your master, Rich Lowry, PNAC Bitch Beinart, the racist wannabe white Malkin and the little fucktards at LGF, Bareback Andy and "Diversity" Instacracker, all you backstabbing, fag hating uncle tom ministers, you can see Dear Leader in action. America's largest port is gone, maybe forever, gas is $5+ a gallon and FEMA is coming. Whores come faster with old men than FEMA is getting to NOLA.
How did your wartime President react? Like Chiang Kai-Shek when the Yellow River flooded in 1944, with corrupt indifference.
Bush, the man your fever dreams built into the next Winston Churchill when he is really the live action Chauncey Gardiner, has failed to everyone, in plain sight, without question. Rick Perry is trying to save his ass, but it ain't working. NOLA looks like ANGOLA and that ain't flying.
Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn't work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE's once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell.
Drunken Chris Hitchens muttered some nonsense about blacks having it so good here. The poor man needs to stay in his bottle or go to Betty Ford before someone beats his treasonous ass stupid. Islamofascism means what, now motherfucker? Shove Islamofascism up your well travelled ass. The most dangerous thing to average Americans is not some mullah in Iraq, not even Osama Bin Laden, but George Bush. If he doesn't get you killed in Iraq, he'll fuck up saving your city so it turns into Escape from New Orleans. Armed junkies roaming the streets, looking for a fix, robbing and looting like Serb paramilitaries and about as sober.
George Bush's ineptitude has killed far more Americans than Osama could have dreamed of.
Some of you still try to see the clothes on the Dauphin, but he's as naked as Peter North around Jenna Jameson. Bush fucked up so bad, FOX turned on him like a rabid dog.
You can't hide behind racism forever. Bush fucked up, Bush is a weak, callous leader and the world knows this like it knows few other things. And all the stolen TV's in the world cannot hide that.
