Safe to say, the comedy shows are practicing most of the the good journalism. Good acting is a lie truthfully told, and good comedy always has truth at its core. Notice how truth is what drives the art, even as art creates its illusions in an effort to reflect the truth back to us. Now think about how "conservatives" are always talkin' shit about what artists are doing.
George Will has no room to criticize anyone for hypocrisy, or for the voluntary blindness that's become the hallmark of the GOP Establishment. ie: "Holy fuck - the Republican Party seems to be filled with Republicans".
He's been a de facto cheerleader for the GOP's fuckery for 35 years - always looking the other way as they pulled the most heinous shit on people, telling us the results of the election proved the party was representing the will of the people and blah blah blah.
But anyway - now he's considered an Elder of the Beltway Tribe, and so of course, we have to listen when he croaks out something that sounds vaguely cogent. File this under - "When You've Lost George Will..." which has grown into a gargantuan folder, and still somehow, George's "conservatives" continue their dickishness apace. (ed note: try to ignore the very old and very stale "windsock" analogy - George himself is old and stale, so - yeah) From WaPo:
Back in the day, small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey O. Graham has become a political windsock, and as such, he — more than the sturdy, substantial elephant — is emblematic of his party today. When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be “one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge. In the past three years, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion.
In 2015, he said Donald Trump was a “jackass.” In February 2016, he said: “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office.” And: “I’m a Republican and he’s not. He’s not a conservative Republican. He’s an opportunist.” Today, Graham, paladin of conservatism and scourge of opportunism, says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party.” Well.
- and -
On a recent day, in 90 minutes he went from “I don’t know” whether the president has the power to declare an emergency and divert into wall-building funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes, to “Time for President . . . to use emergency powers to build Wall.” The next day, he scrambled up the escalation ladder by using capitalization: “Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.” Two days later, he scampered down a few rungs, calling for his hero to accept a short-term funding measure to open the government while wall negotiations continue. Stay tuned for more acrobatics.
But stay focused on this: Anyone — in Graham-speak, ANYONE — who at any time favors declaring an emergency, or who does not denounce the mere suggestion thereof, thereby abandons constitutional government. Yes, such a declaration would be technically legal. Congress has put on every president’s desk this (to adopt Justice Robert Jackson’s language in his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision affirming the constitutionality of interning of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent) “loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Or an implausible one. However, an anti-constitutional principle would be affirmed. The principle: Any president can declare an emergency and “repurpose” funds whenever any of his policy preferences that he deems unusually important are actively denied or just ignored by the legislative branch.
Why do they come to Congress, these people such as Graham? These people who, affirmatively or by their complicity of silence, trifle with our constitutional architecture, and exhort the president to eclipse the legislative branch, to which they have no loyalty comparable to their party allegiance?
Seven times, Graham has taken the oath of congressional office, “solemnly” swearing to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it, “without any mental reservation.” Graham, who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.
One important point that Mr Will doesn't include in this little sermon is that once Cult45 is out of office, guys just like George Will are going to assure us that either it never even happened, or it was some really strange anomaly.
Yeah, you bet - an anomaly that keeps happening in much the same way over and over again.
Mr Will wrote this same column about Bush43, and then carried a lot of water for the people who needed us to forget about that particular chapter of GOP fuckery, having done almost exactly the same after Reagan's fuckery.
At least this time, he touches on the problem - that Lindsey Graham is a symptom of the disease - but he fails to point it up properly.
The failure is all about refusing to deal honestly with that problem. And even more to the point - the failure lies in promoting the kind of memory loss that pimps Deliberate Ignorance on the part of Team Rube so they'll keep voting against their own best interests.
45* and Lindsey Graham and Steve King and Devin Nunes and and and - those guys have not remade the party in some weirdly warped image of themselves. They are the near-perfect reflection of what the GOP has been evolving into for the last 40 years, at the behest of the guys with all the money, and the power to buy these Coin-Operated Politicians.
Beau Of The Fifth Column There are very few people outside of Cult45 who think he has the authority to use a Declaration of Emergency to build his wall. And there are plenty of people who are pretty confidant that he doesn't have the actual balls to follow thru on his threat - to claim he has that authority.
One great Take-Away:
Even if you support what he wants to do, if you support the way he wants to do it, then you're betraying American democracy.
I'm going to stay with my thinking that it's a fool's errand trying to predict what this particular Ass Hat POTUS is going to do - because that's his basic game.
He sets it up with, "Maybe I will and maybe I won't", and once you've predicted he'll go one way, he'll almost always go some other way - usually, picking something he never mentioned before, which catches us more or less off guard, which is how he wants it.
The thing I try to keep in mind is that there are no guiding principles in place with Donald J Trump.
There are principles. They do exist. They're lofty-sounding and noble and familiar. But everything is fungible. Everything is situational. Every "principle" can be bent and shaped in order for it to be smash-fitted to whatever immediate need presents itself.
Maybe it's because I've been binge-ing The Sopranos on HBO the last few days, but holy crap - 45* has come into pretty sharp focus for me.
"I'm not a scientist but..." That one needs to be added to the big shit can right along with
"I don't mean to be a jerk about it, but..."
"I'm all about the women's rights thing, but..."
"I'm not a racist, but..."
There's nothing that comes after that kind of opening that anybody should listen to for any reason other than some weird masochistic desire for a little aural pain. Trevor Noah:
And I ask again: Why do we have to rely on late nite comedy shows for honest media criticism?
Jennifer Rubin, WaPo: It takes remarkable skill, when you think about it, to claim victimhood when your enemies are threatened with assassination. But for President Trump, his state media and his cultish following, victimhood is central to their identity and critical to their mobilization. A party in control of every branch of government is the victim. White males — even a wealthy Yale graduate with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench — are victims. The cops who shoot unarmed black teens are victims. Residents of the small towns in the Rust Belt where few, if any, illegal immigrants live are victims of immigrants. Forget the crime statistics; we’re victims of criminals who are here illegally. Conservatives who control an entire media universe devoid of journalistic standards are victims of the mainstream media. Americans are victims (ripped off!) by an international system that made us the world’s only superpower. - and - As we learn that one suspect is in custody in the mail-bomb investigation, we still do not know the exact motives behind the assault on our democracy. But one thing is for sure: Trump will take no responsibility for his incendiary language, not even for his praise of a congressman who body-slammed a reporter, his dehumanization of immigrants, his incitement of violence (“I’d like to punch him in the face”) or his insistence that the media is the “enemy of the people.” He’s not only not responsible for the bombing attempts in any way; he’s a victim of the media citing his inflammatory language as inspiration for political violence.
The consistency is always there:
I didn't hit you
But if I did, I didn't hit you hard
But if I did, you had it coming because you told everybody that I've threatened to hit you
Now let's get into why everything I grew up with is a whole big pile of racist shit - and that's always a little scary, but always always always something we have to face up to, because we don't get anywhere if we stop learning new things.
...but I'm not going to pretend the kind of bullshit coming from the White House is new in any way. Maybe the sheer mass of the bullshit is something we haven't seen before, but we can't afford to start thinking this is normal.
NYT, Frank Bruni: It hit me this week, around the time when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was blithely seconding Chief of Staff John Kelly’s Civil War revisionism, that I missed Sean Spicer.
I missed the panic in his eyes, which signaled a scintilla of awareness that he was peddling hooey. I missed the squeak in his voice, which suggested perhaps the tiniest smidgen of shame.
He never seemed to me entirely at home in his domicile of deception; she dwells without evident compunction in a gaudier fairyland of grander fictions. There’s no panic. No squeak. Just that repulsed expression, as if a foul odor had wafted in and she knew — just knew — that the culprit was CNN.
True, she hasn’t told a lie as tidy as Spicer’s ludicrousness about Donald Trump’s inauguration crowds. But her briefings are breathtaking — certainly this week’s were. For some 20 minutes every afternoon, down is up, paralysis is progress, enmity is harmony, stupid is smart, villain is victim, disgrace is honor, plutocracy is populism and Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia if anyone would summon the nerve to investigate her (because, you know, that never, ever happens). I watch and listen with sheer awe.
With despair, too, because Sanders doesn’t draw nearly the censure or ridicule that Spicer did, and the reason isn’t her. It’s us. More precisely, it’s what Trump and his presidency have done to us. Little more than nine months in, we’ve surrendered any expectation of honesty. We’re inured.
Bob Costas from some years ago, which might just as well have been yesterday - or tomorrow or whenever the next installment comes in this stoopid monetized ritual of sacrifice to the god of steel dick substitutes.
It's wrong to do it in the streets
It's wrong to do it in the Tweets
You cannot do it on the field
You cannot do it if you kneel
And you don't do it if you're rich
You ungrateful son of a bitch
Because there's one thing that's a fact
You cannot protest if you're black
