i dont know what i'd do without driftglass.

Driftglass (who is threatening to abandon his sundaymornincomindown posts because C&L and atrios also cover sunday tv - wtf? BOOOOOOOOOOO)

Bennett made a mad ass of himself on Meet the Press, but really, how novel is that anymore? He lumbered his peeved manatee act onto the Sunday boards where he came across like he always does; loud, gassy and professionally outraged. Demanding answers from the other panelists like he was the substitute host on Mike Savage’s Hate Radio atrocity, screening calls and controlling the mike instead of one-of-four guests on a panel.

And the others – even, eventually, that Liberal firebrand, William Safire – just rolled their eyes and kept on talking in semi-reasonable tones as Bennett flopped and whined, a belligerent fool trying to commandeer the format.

Leading to the same genus of question that rattles around in my head more and more these days.

Who is it, specifically, behind-the-scenes , that keeps giving these slabs of bile minutes of network air?

Who, exactly, continues to give these shitheels second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth chances?

And who was it, specifically, that hands the keys to a major Sunday programs to a weak, partisan bint like Mrs. Alan Greenspan?

Who, by name, believes that packing a panel with one crusading journalist, a scrivener for the WSJ, Spiro Agnew’s speechwriter and Bill Bennett achieves anything that anyone could call balance?

Off to one horizon there is the supplicant media, and off darkening the other is a waterboned Congress. Sleazing, rigging, sliming and lying their way to power, desperate to keep the Bush junta in control, and desperate to frame the +60% of the American public that now clearly sees them for the criminals, freaks and traitors that they are as the fringe.
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Ironically, if they had just bothered to listen to anyone who was trying to warn them before they drove the ship of State off the fucking cliff, a lot of us wouldn’t be angry.

And if they had anything like a cortex functional enough to actually learn -- just fucking ONCE -- that their tragic, stupid, lethal mistakes aren’t a trivial byproduct of your ideology, but the inevitable and deliberate consequences of that ideology, there would be a chance for rapprochement.

But the more I talk and listen to Modern Conservatives, the more painfully clear it becomes that we cannot coexist in any normal sense. We will never find common ground – nor should we try – with people who side with fascists and openly work for our extinction.

Point to virtually any Bush policy and you point to a reeking disaster. Not a mere misunderstanding or difference in nuance or emphasis, but a genuine disaster. This White House has been a series of catastrophes, for any one of which the GOP would have long ago smashed in the door of the Oval Office and demanded the resignation, hide, ears and tail of any President who had presided over it.

Provided that President was a Democrat.

But point not to just one or two debacles this President has wrought, but to the collective ruin to our treasury, our future, our reputation, or moral authority, out Constitution, our Gulf Coast, our military, our educational system, our environment, our language, our identity…and Republicans yawn.

They smirk.

They giggle.

They pooh-pooh it all as not so bad.

These people have been doing the cultural equivalent of forcing Jello shots of Ebola Virus down Liberty’s throat for the last 20 years, and in the last six have upped the dosage to include Hanta and Avian Flu chasers. And now that we are bleeding freely from eye and asshole, they continue pouring their poison into the mouth of our dying nation, sniping that we need to Stay The Course or things might get worse.

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Conservativism is the nightmare from which we must awake.

But no, to obey the kabuki forms of modern media, the closest one is allowed to come to correctly diagnosing both the carcinoma and the cure is to always divide blame equally, regardless of the facts.
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That Republicans want power, but not to govern.

That they loathe the Constitution as an impediment on the road to Corporate Jesusland…except when it can be perverted into a bludgeon to beat a Centrist Democrat bloody.

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So there is no Party differentiation. The “members of Congress” are all equally wrong. It is “politicians” who are all equally bad.

“Individual members” are occasionally willing to stand up, but “ideology” trumps institutional responsibility.

It is “Congress” and not the “Republican Congress” who let Dubya get away with his signing statement obscenity.

It is “Congress” and not the “Republican Congress” who refuse to hold serious hearings about anything related to the multitude of crimes of George W. Bush.
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But in the world of real politics, where there are real people dying behind the immoral policies of a particular Party and ideology, it is obscene and criminally irresponsible not to name names and allocate cause and effect honestly.

i dont know what i'd do without driftglass.