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They seamlessly moved from death panels to incarceration squads -- the taxman is gonna get ya, O ye of little insurance -- and now they've fetishized a wholly imaginary concoction of institutionalized, taxpayer bailouts for Wall Street.
Republicans are less the Party of No than the Party of No Limits, No Decency, No Shame. I've never quite seen anything like it. Even when they terrorized the citizenry of yesteryear about the socialist, confiscatory angles of Social Security and Medicare, their bogeyman tactics were couched more in the generalized ideology of spooky possibilities than outright, specific lies.
These days? They just make things up. Technically speaking, they sit and wait for the latest, focus-grouped memo from Field Marshal Frank Luntz's Ministry of Propaganda; then, no matter how outrageously contortive or blindly abusive of the facts, they parrot the revealed, uninformed fears of the pathologically clueless, who themselves are aping the fearmongers, who are feeding the clueless, and so on.
Accountability, even when rarely achieved, means little to nothing. Yesterday, for instance, on CNN's "State of the Union," host Candy Crowley made several mildly courageous attempts to pin down the unctuous Mitch McConnell on this matter of "taxpayer bailouts":
But Senator, she persisted, isn't it true that banks -- not taxpayers -- would be ponying up the dough? Finally, finally, with an astounding dismissiveness of what he had been insisting, Sen. McConnell replied that "Regardless of how the money is produced, it is a bailout fund that sort of guarantees in perpetuity that we will be intervening once again to bail out these big firms."
I guess it's three strikes and you're in: "Regardless," Ms. Crowley, "we" will be the bailers -- a subtle shift from "taxpayers" to the body politic, but every bit as inaccurate. Thus even in tacit acknowledgement that he had just baldly lied to a national audience several times over, Mitch was to remain an unruffled model of virtuous truth.
If CNN really wanted to get its ratings back up, it could have begun that publicity road yesterday with Candy Crowley at the helm, telling the Senate minority leader: Fella, we aren't moving to another question until you convincingly explain to me and our audience just how it was that you didn't just lie -- repeatedly.
Yet even better than the dull CNN circus that was, was Sen. McConnell's further insistence that his colleague, John Cornyn -- chairman of the GOP's fundraising apparatus of the National Republican Senatorial Committee -- had joined him in a recent visit to Wall Street bankers only because of a tautology: John, you see, is a senator from Texas, Ms. Crowley, and as such he is very, very concerned with current banking legislation which might affect the good people of Texas, said Mitch -- repeatedly.
Again, CNN could have made ratings history next week by Ms. Crowley's missed opportunity of the previous week: Senator, are you friggin' kidding me? No one minds a little spin here and there, Mr. Minority Leader, but pirouetting on our passable intelligence is something else. So tell us, just how bad was the extortion, and how far did it cut both ways?
Nor did host David Gregory over at NBC's "Meet the Press" stop Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn in her circular tracks when she stunningly averred that what Wall Street needs is less government regulation and more oversight.
That was funny enough, yet all too sad -- and I mean that in terms of Gregory's retreat, more than Blackburn's aggression -- was her serial reluctance to condemn Rep. Michele Bachmann's characterization of the Obama administration as a "gangster government."
There was once a rough equilibrium of respect (as well as self-respect) on the Sunday shows: As long as partisan pols twisted the facts and degraded the opposition within limits, the network hosts, within limits, wouldn't press the matter at hand. Now, the verbal warfare is asymmetrical; everything's fair game for the Party of No Shame, while the hosts continue playing by the traditional rules of properly asked and duly answered, time to move along.
I suspect, however, that a beautifully ugly dialectic is in the offing -- in time, some ratings-hungry network executive will push his or her Sunday-morning host to push back with relentless abandon. And that will be just one more step to the destructively loud anarchy that we still call our democratic process.
Republicans are less the Party of No than the Party of No Limits, No Decency, No Shame. I've never quite seen anything like it. Even when they terrorized the citizenry of yesteryear about the socialist, confiscatory angles of Social Security and Medicare, their bogeyman tactics were couched more in the generalized ideology of spooky possibilities than outright, specific lies.
These days? They just make things up. Technically speaking, they sit and wait for the latest, focus-grouped memo from Field Marshal Frank Luntz's Ministry of Propaganda; then, no matter how outrageously contortive or blindly abusive of the facts, they parrot the revealed, uninformed fears of the pathologically clueless, who themselves are aping the fearmongers, who are feeding the clueless, and so on.
Accountability, even when rarely achieved, means little to nothing. Yesterday, for instance, on CNN's "State of the Union," host Candy Crowley made several mildly courageous attempts to pin down the unctuous Mitch McConnell on this matter of "taxpayer bailouts":
But Senator, she persisted, isn't it true that banks -- not taxpayers -- would be ponying up the dough? Finally, finally, with an astounding dismissiveness of what he had been insisting, Sen. McConnell replied that "Regardless of how the money is produced, it is a bailout fund that sort of guarantees in perpetuity that we will be intervening once again to bail out these big firms."
I guess it's three strikes and you're in: "Regardless," Ms. Crowley, "we" will be the bailers -- a subtle shift from "taxpayers" to the body politic, but every bit as inaccurate. Thus even in tacit acknowledgement that he had just baldly lied to a national audience several times over, Mitch was to remain an unruffled model of virtuous truth.
If CNN really wanted to get its ratings back up, it could have begun that publicity road yesterday with Candy Crowley at the helm, telling the Senate minority leader: Fella, we aren't moving to another question until you convincingly explain to me and our audience just how it was that you didn't just lie -- repeatedly.
Yet even better than the dull CNN circus that was, was Sen. McConnell's further insistence that his colleague, John Cornyn -- chairman of the GOP's fundraising apparatus of the National Republican Senatorial Committee -- had joined him in a recent visit to Wall Street bankers only because of a tautology: John, you see, is a senator from Texas, Ms. Crowley, and as such he is very, very concerned with current banking legislation which might affect the good people of Texas, said Mitch -- repeatedly.
Again, CNN could have made ratings history next week by Ms. Crowley's missed opportunity of the previous week: Senator, are you friggin' kidding me? No one minds a little spin here and there, Mr. Minority Leader, but pirouetting on our passable intelligence is something else. So tell us, just how bad was the extortion, and how far did it cut both ways?
Nor did host David Gregory over at NBC's "Meet the Press" stop Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn in her circular tracks when she stunningly averred that what Wall Street needs is less government regulation and more oversight.
That was funny enough, yet all too sad -- and I mean that in terms of Gregory's retreat, more than Blackburn's aggression -- was her serial reluctance to condemn Rep. Michele Bachmann's characterization of the Obama administration as a "gangster government."
There was once a rough equilibrium of respect (as well as self-respect) on the Sunday shows: As long as partisan pols twisted the facts and degraded the opposition within limits, the network hosts, within limits, wouldn't press the matter at hand. Now, the verbal warfare is asymmetrical; everything's fair game for the Party of No Shame, while the hosts continue playing by the traditional rules of properly asked and duly answered, time to move along.
I suspect, however, that a beautifully ugly dialectic is in the offing -- in time, some ratings-hungry network executive will push his or her Sunday-morning host to push back with relentless abandon. And that will be just one more step to the destructively loud anarchy that we still call our democratic process.
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
Let The Sun Shine In......
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