WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER SCUM?!
This stuff isn't hard for non-cultists, who may be in terrifyingly short supply
After my post yesterday about MSNBC host John Heilemann showing his ass and getting it not merely spanked but smashed into flabby gluteal-pulp by Russell Brand's fact-hammer, I got a response that unfortunately no doubt reflects the blunted thinking of numerous other American readers of my posts:
Where is your email about Fox lying? I look forward to seeing that one soon.
This strikes me in the same way as would a response to a post ripping Shelby Houlihan or other dopers consisting entirely of, "I patiently await your dissection of testing-lab corruption and the flaws of USADA." It tacitly concedes the (irrefutable) point about MSNBC being laden with toxic bullshitters while whimsically demanding I spend time balancing the ugliness scale by investigating the network's adversaries. But it's a common enough reaction to warrant a public response.
(As to the unasked question about USADA, my mental modeling of that august body is essentially Travis Tygart masturbating Jame Gumb-style before a mirror that has a Polaroid taped to one upper corner of Max Siegel fisting himself to a Swoosh and a pile of cash; this model is somewhat fungible. Also, it’s fine if you have no idea who Tygart and Siegel are, but do look into Gumb. And Polaroids.)
For perhaps the third time in as many years: I criticize nominally liberal outlets because these outlets have long purported to represent my and many people’s interests—e.g., access to quality public education and decent healthcare, adherence to good science, freedom of expression, marriage equality, and personal autonomy—whereas Fox News does not and never has.
And these “liberal” outlets are systematically lying to everyday Americans just as completely as the Democratic Party for which they serve alternately as a fellatrices and spokesclowns. To deny any of this is to trumpet a rank and unholy degree of bawling cluelessness.
MSNBC's and CNN's personalities and writers—and sure, include others of your reasoned choosing if you like—are conscious liars who should all be fired and hurled by their ankles off a cliff into a vast orange sea of corrosive acid, their booster-ravaged bodies helicoptering gaily around as they scream and plummet toward a triumphant splash of near-instantaneous corporeal dissolution, with hissing clouds of sulfuric stink-steam (and the last thing they ate) the only evidence they ever lived at all, as pungently ephemeral in the end as they truly were all along.
Since this is an unlikely outcome for most of them, I'm criticizing them instead.
Why am I so pissy? Because it's unclear to me what besides brain shrinkage or mechanical cranial damage would lead any conscientious Earth citizen to take umbrage at criticism of people who lie to millions of viewers or readers a day in the service of a feckless government and drug companies that knowingly sicken and kill people for small marketplace gains.
What's the source of the confusion, mateys? Someone's gonna have to supply me with an easily digested PowerPoint for this one.
Here's something else people disturbed by my not-quite-nascent hatred of these “liberal” pols and pundits seem to be missing: Criticism of person or thing X does not mean the approval of the opposite or antagonist of person or thing X. Or if that's too confusing, try sometimes there are only bad options.
I'm convinced this is also easy enough to internalize with a little work, like fifteen whole seconds’ worth. All you have to do is accept that the illusion of the U.S. being a legitimate democracy in fact vanished years ago, and that placing any hope in even a partial return to previous notions of liberty and decency in WEF/WHO/Gates Foundation world is a screaming, grimly hilarious farce. Pretty soon, your public opinions will be tied to your freedom of movement and bank-account balances, though probably not so soon that I'll be affected myself (give the insidious yet unpretentious onset of relevant policies three to five years).
When I say I mistrust all politicians and corporate messaging, I'm not equivocating to weasel out of the pointless task of partisan scorekeeping. It is simply obvious to me that the corruption of America is as wide and deep as it looks.
Institutional greed and power-mongering are human universals: once you accept that we're nothing more than chimps that can talk and (often) hump a hole for more than two seconds without blowing nut— just hooting, turdflinging imbeciles in suits, proudly fitted with multipurpose life-degrading tracking devices—then our capacity for grandiose intraspecies mayhem becomes more starkly apparent. Owing at least in part to these aggravating characteristics, the federal government itself is the enemy, not the alt-tribe bastards a few towns yonder voting for the “wrong” bastardly candidates.
I used to watch CNN and MSNBC with some measure of trust. I have never consistently watched Fox News, but I specfically expressed mistrust of their personnel in yesterday's post, too:
As Brand emphasized, the point isn't that Fox News is an honorable news organization. It's that all of these businesses invariably and conspicuously serve diabolical interests far above their own cozy pay grades.
My messager seems convinced that Fox News also lies. I wouldn't doubt it, although mostly I envision its cadre of blond-and-botoxed dullards yacking ferociously about the darkies and the rump-rangers disempowering Jesus more and more by the hip-hoppy, codpiece-boasting day. (Actually, that Laura Ingraham gal sure seems like a real sweetie.)
But this messager did not produce even a hint of an example of a lie, despite clear and overwhelming motivation to do so. I am not going on such a hunting trip, but will happily acknowledge any such lies discovered and verified by others.
It's also worth pointing out that Fox News has been understood to be an instrument of corporate conservatism since its inception. It has never really pretended to be much else besides rowdy, lowbrow entertaiment. MSNBC and CNN, on the other hand, not only pretend to be news outlets but have the nerve to feign a committed fight against disinformation. They employ some of the most invidious assholes on Earth, as do The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, et al.
Let's even say it's objectively true that Fox News is objectively more dishonest than all “liberal” outlets combined. In athletics terms, all this would result in is a comparison of the relative ethics of known dopers or course-cutters who beat kittens for stress relief. Doesn't anyone hunger for accurate journalism, the very core purpose of which is to expose government secrets and authoritarian machinations?
These people, starting with Rachel Maddow, deserve to perish in the street under cold, stinking rags and be buried with their rotting asses sticking awkwardly out of the ground, in neat gassy rows, so that playful passerby can jam dildos, used N95 masks, and spare change into the maggot-ridden mess until bunghole-outward putrefaction renders this exercise physically pointless (as well as, arguably , fetishist). Failing this demise, they should be bitchstruck in the face by a recently cuckolded and newly humiliated Fresh Prince of Bel Air at a gathering of the most ridiculously pious cliche-spewing morons alive.
Many longtime Democratic voters apparently do not believe that the concepts of buyer's remorse or internal criticism apply to their own politics or even “news” networks. People quit jobs, get divorces, even turn on their own patrents or kids. But GOD FUCKING FORBID you admit that some beaming jizzcake you voted for sucks donkey-dick, and even better, doesn't care whether you live or die as long as you remain a sucker at the polls in the meantime.
Again for the cult members: None of this implies that Republicans will save the day or should be spared being thrown from high places balls-first on to wrought-iron cemetery fences.
But beyond that, who in the hell, in anything resembling their right mind, gets upset at criticism of a cable network—even a properly functioning one, let alone the demoralized entity MSNBC has become? This is another depressing theme here. And moreover, these people advertise their absolute, nauseating commitment to tribalism and whataboutism rather than facts, all while swallowing and confidently regurgitating bullshit.
My quality of life suffers greatly from the production of this bullshit and the willingness of deluded Democrats to maniacally believe it no matter how obviously stupid and wrong it is.
During the G.W. Bush years, I was against the government starting needless wars and expanding the surveillance of Americans, and I railed against that era's reality-challenged culture warriors, then right-wing Christians seeking to shoehorn creationism into public-school science curricula and ban porn (not including their own stashes, mostly on VHS cassettes stolen from Baptist church basements). I was, or tried to be, on the side of facts, whatever they were, and against authoritarian creep.
I haven't changed one whisker in these areas, although I've abandoned the idea that civilization can be spared the relentless advances and intrusions of psychotic, bonfire-ready technocrats. And a big reason for this is that people are hopelessly pliable when haplessly arranged into tribes with mostly imaginary, easily overlooked, and negotiatiable differences, all of which obscure our common purpose as Americans.
This isn't “their” goverment. It is ours, at least on very important paper. In one of the most unforgettable and fogotten speeches in modern history, Abraham Lincoln affirmed to a shattered nation that the United States, when united, consists in “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
By the people, for the people.
Even the asshats.
Lincoln spoke those words one hundred and sixty years ago in a Pennsylvaania battlefield-gone-graveyard, everyone listening along with the fallen in their midst were Americans under the U.S. Constitution. He also willed that our government, in this form, “shall not perish from the earth.”
If it hasn't perished, it was ushered into hiding beginning around forty years ago. This administration continues the implacable march of flag-waving murder and wasteful wealth reallocation, combining the worst of the Bush-Cheney-Haliburton administration with the most depraved and bloodthirsty Obama-Clinton Arab-bombing, torture-happy neoliberals and neocons.
Wars for profit, screwing over the poor and the vulnerable, surveillance expansion, Wall Street thievery, worthless schools, the intential and reckless fomenting of hollow yet effectual discord: We got it all.
Anyone who refuses to accept this merely because the party in charge has a “D” attached to it and is loaded with multicolored multigendered figures is an utter fool. We've all* had plenty of time to understand and accept that Anthony Fauci is not merely a hero but a criminal, that Joe Biden is a mud-brained chortling pissbucket, that covid was purposefully overblown by the same cancerous actors who both created the coronavirus and the mRNA shit-soup forced on people as “treatment,” that America is as responsible if not more so than Russia for the purposeful eradication of Ukraine, that men who pretend to be women can't have periods or babies, and that accusing someone of the sin of “whiteness” is no different than casual chatter about lazy blacks, rapey Mexicans, or money-grubbing Jews—that is, flat-out racist and nothing more.
To anyone who thinks the Dems or their networks are doing a good job, then we differ there and that’s fine. Some folks evidently like class warfare, liars, mass violence, fascism, liars, a de facto state media, liars, the promise of a whole generation of uneducated kids primed for obesity drugs, liars, and people dying from shots they didn't need to have that didn't stop transmission of a harmless-to-children virus engineered by American spoogebags.
But mostly liars, the kind who have convinced many of my friends of really dumb and destructive things. Liars and hypocrites and fuckups of privilege, like Lindsay Crouse and the Roches and Malcolm Gladwell from the far-less-visible joggersphere; swarms of exquisitely programmed, fame-craving nepo-tards failing upward, Chardonnay glasses in hand and secure in the reality that no amount of one-point ranting from pissants like me will ever compel the slightest nudge to any of their flagrant, power-serving immoralities.
I don't enjoy life much as it is. I'd despise it far more if I knew I had been converted into a pliant ignoramus, perceiving rivers of gilded wisdom in the freshets of turd-strewn bilge coursing through my own smug head. Especially if this happened with my own permission.
I'm sure my bizarre and at times painful allegiance to reality has cost me a great deal over the years, because this manifests in ways that has seen me prematurely part company with quality people and a few honorable organizations over the decades, apart from the considerable wreckage I created or catalyzed by drinking. That's just me being me.
But personal prickliness and peccadilloes aside, I'll stop using my brain when the cost of thinking becomes greater than that of navigating other people's uninvited brainwashing and bafflement. Since I have no respect for purposeful and modifiable ignorance, this means I'll stop when either I or all the paid liars and crooks have finally disappeared.
(Note: This is the longest thing I have ever typed out on a phone. I'm already a lax proofreader, so I won't be surprised, or care much, if this turns out to contain a panoply of oopsies.)