Mock, Paper, Scissors

Regular readers know that our sometimes mantra, “Both Sides Don’t” is generally ignored; the pontificating poltroons in our courtesan press continue to belch up false equivalences to try to appear non-biased.

Our pal Driftglass has long said that the punditry lie of Both Sides Do It is the essential lie that lets all the other pundit lies exist, and we agree. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, any criticism of the Right immediately triggers a reflexive, “yes, but the Democrats…” and the topic shifts. The thing is that they are never equivalents and usually not even related. It’s like trying to pay your bar tab by handing over your dry-cleaning ticket. But I digress.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones asks us, “Has the mainstream media finally had enough?,” and he postulates that maybe they have, reluctantly and bitterly started to reach the conclusion that the GOP is both rudderless and off the rails:

“It seems to me that something has happened over the past three months: the nonpartisan media has finally started to internalize the idea that the modern Republican Party has gone off the rails. Their leaders can’t control their backbenchers. They throw pointless temper tantrums about everything President Obama proposes. They have no serious ideas of their own aside from wanting to keep taxes low on the rich. They’re serially obsessed with a few hobby horses — Fast & Furious! Obamacare! Benghazi! — that no one else cares about. Their fundraising is controlled by scam artists. They’re rudderless and consumed with infighting. They’re demographically doomed.”

OK, that is sort of the conventional wisdom of Lefty Blogostan, what else have you got?

Recently, though, my sense is that this has shifted a bit. The framing of even straight new reports feels just a little bit jaded, as if veteran reporters just can’t bring themselves to pretend one more time that climate change is a hoax, Benghazi is a scandal, and federal spending is spiraling out of control. It’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the same old shrieking over the same old issues is really newsworthy.

Question: Am I just imagining this? Or has there really been a small but noticeable shift in the tone of recent reporting?

It’s a worthy question: are Drum’s Spidey-senses tingling?

My sense is that the MSM print media is just sort of sticking its metaphorical toe in the water of actually reporting, but I suspect that it won’t last. The electronic media (Dancing with the Gregory, This Week with a Greek Dwarf, etc.) have not even tried to break the surface of Villager foolishness.

I mean, just look at the top 3 Sunday Talkies line-up:

-NBC’s “Meet the Press”: White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); husband to former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) and retired Space Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly; roundtable with Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

–ABC’s “This Week”: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI); White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; roundtable with ABC News’ George Will, Rep. Joaquín Castro (D-TX), former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, former Romney 2012 campaign senior strategist Stuart Stevens; “Sunday Spotlight” segment with author and Johns Hopkins Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery Dr. Ben Carson (“America the Beautiful”)

–CBS’s “Face the Nation”: White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; former Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) and Mayor Cory Booker (D-Newark); Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl; defense and foreign policy roundtable with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Foreign Policy Magazine’s Tom Ricks and CBS News’ Margaret Brennan; political roundtable with Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter and CBS News’ John Dickerson

It’s not encouraging that so many pundits who have been proven demonstrably wrong continue to bloviate their conventional (incorrect) wisdom, week after week, month after month, year after year. There is no consequence for these people to be wrong on issue after issue. Next week, Walnuts will be on another Sunday Talkie.

In related news, a comet exploded over Russia indicating the end of the dinosaur era. Let’s hope Grandpa Walnuts gets the message.

(Mother Jones)

Poor, old Grandpa Walnuts, there he was whoring himself to the media screaming for a select committee meeting to look in on what happened in Libya, when the media had the temerity to ask him why he was not attending the meeting that he was demanding that the government to hold.

Someone needs to remind SoyBlo that when she puts Daddy McCain into the Old White Guy Home For Angry Senators, just set up a mic and a camera and he’ll settle in well. Bonus idea: paint the room green and put out M&Ms.

(CNN)

A jackass meets a llama

This is like the Oscars of stupid: Grandpa Walnuts is going to help the girl with the far-away eyes, Bachmann-the-Nut, retire her $1,000,000 2012 Goat Rodeo campaign debt by hosting a fund-raiser for her in Washington DC; oh, and she is trying to raise money for her campaign to maintain her current job as tinfoil hat adjuster and potted plant inspector.

Which only goes to prove, that Walnuts is a fool for a shapely middle-aged brunette with marriage problems, even if previously he dissed her.

(CityPages)

Poor Grandpa Walnuts, there he is an olds himself and the AARP — which is like an olds frat — has turned on him, betrayed him, and supported the healthcare reform bill, which Walnuts knows means death panels and the end of Medicare, and if it were a foreign country he would bomb it.

But because Grandpa Walnuts still thinks he won the election, he is now ordering the olds to cut up their AARP cards to protest. No more early bird specials at Denny’s for you!

Luckily for Walnuts, he married a booze heiress, and so he doesn’t care about the early bird specials, unless there is a good soup.

“Get off my lawn!”

Once again, Grandpa Walnuts shows us that he knows very little about technology, the internet, or about innovation, as he introduces the ironic and amusingly entitled the Internet Freedom Act, which will block the Federal Communications Commission from enacting the so-called Net Neutrality rules.

And he’s such a moron, he probably believes that keeping the internet as it is right now is somehow regulating it, so his bill, in effect would allow the ISPs to have different price rates, speeds, ability to censor websites or disable applications… all without government interference, and this will make a thousand roses bloom in the desert. Somehow.

As you may recall, the lobbyist Walnuts was allegedly not screwing during his campaign was from one of the telecoms, and they really, really want to block Net Neutrality, it being the democratizing force on the web allowing little guys like you and me to be on even footing with big guys like WalMart. Imagine being the manager that has to negotiate the lobbyist’s bonus for playing slap and tickle with that fossil?

One year ago today, Mooselini was thrust into the national spotlight, thanks to the failing and flailing presidential campaign that Grandpa Walnuts was running. And in some sort of act of desperate daring-do, the old fart unleashed upon an unsuspecting public perhaps the greatest grifter and her clan of hillbillies in modern American history.

Besides the animal like Todd, we have:

• Track: the alleged meth connection sent to Iraq to head off a criminal charge, and to clean him out, but it’s pretty close to ground zero in the heroin supply chain.
• Bristol: the single mother of Trip, ex-girlfriend of Levi and noted abstinance educator.
• Willow: the mysterious Palin with a vacant Jan-Brady smile. bristol, Bristol, BRISTOL!
• Piper: perhaps the one to keep an eye on, she might snap any moment now that she is the second-place human shield when her brother…
• Trig/Algorythm: who may or may not be Mooselini’s kid, and served as the campaign’s prop and took first place as a human shield away from Piper. Trig is the likable Palin.
• Levi: the handsome but stupid sperm donor and father of…
• Trip: who probably is another likable Palin, because he is really a Johnston.

Sweet Jeebus? Only one year? Really?

Don’t forget to tip your waitress on the way out.

(Via the Never SFW Dis-Brimstone Daily Pitchfork)

“He threw out [the words] ‘You people — you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,’ ” the source said. “It was almost as if [he was saying] ‘You’re cut off!’ We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that.“

– Anonymous Source

I guess someone finally told Grandpa Walnuts that he lost the election, and that hispanics went 2:1 for the Carebear.

(Hat tip: TexBetsy)

So I’m looking around for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra. And the McCain campaign, love ‘em, you know, they’re a lot of people around me, but nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray.

– Mooselini

The very funny and comically mismanaged preznintial Walnuts-Mooselini campaign ended when?– last year — and Mooselini is still whining about how she was treated? Wanna bet she still holds a grudge against her first boyfriend, or that business partner of her husband’s she was shtupping?

Getty Images – Imagine going home to meet the ‘rents and Uncle Joe.

“No one wants to date a freak show.”

Poor little Butterball is having a hard time getting laid, and she blames politics:

Here’s the biggest surprise: I am not only turned off by people who voted for Barack Obama, but I am also turned off by people that voted for my dad—or more so, obsessive supporters of my dad,” she continued. “Recently, over dinner, a guy started explaining his reasons for supporting President Obama during the election (I didn’t ask, I think the poor guy felt guilty) and I immediately found any attraction I had previously had dissipate. But same thing happens if a guy starts talking about all the reasons why my father should be president.

The level of introspection that heiresses have seems mighty low these days. It probably has not occurred to her that with Papa’s Thighs and Momma’s Eyes, without the zillions of greenbacks in suds funds behind her, she most likely would be alone on a Saturday night anyway.

(AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, David Kadlubowski)

…both of ‘em.

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(AFP/Robyn Beck)

“…eight years?”

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In this May 9, 2000, file photo Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., reacts as Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, makes a statement during a joint news conference after their meeting in Pittsburgh, Pa. Even as McCain said he looked forward to ‘enthusiastically campaigning’ for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, the vanquished rival had to be prompted before using the word ‘endorse.’ McCain compared the chore to swallowing a bitter mouthful of medicine. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File)

…to get screwed by Chimpy McStagger twice?

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(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

…lacks something.

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REUTERS/Brian Snyder

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REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

McCain condoms? Not on Spike, no thanks.

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(Brian Snyder/Reuters)

“…Ol’ Meg Whitman here is going to set up an eBay store for us! I wonder what we can get for the Grand Canyon?”

WATERLOO, Iowa – Republican John McCain said Sunday that one-third of the $150,000 that the GOP spent on clothing and accessories for his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and her family, “is given back.”

…McCain strategist Mark Salter said “about a third of it was returned immediately” because they were the wrong size, or for other reasons.

Gee, they don’t say if she got a store credit or not.

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

“…let’s sing it again, Chimpy, it was so much fun the first 8 years!”

REUTERS/Brian Snyder

“…and you’ll go from a rooster to a capon,” said his ATM machine.

(AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

“…my soulmate needs me!”

From MSNBC… sounds like Mooselini thinks Mad Dog is her VP.

…Palin may be overstating her running mate’s positions on several key social policy issues, in an effort to shore up support from Christian conservatives. She told a prominent religious conservative Monday that McCain was committed to the positions in the Republican National Committee’s platform that are more conservative than his previously stated views.

“I do, from the bottom of my heart,” she told Dobson. “I am such a strong believer that McCain believes in those strong planks and we do have good conversations about some of the details too, about the different planks and what they represent.”

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

“…to still be talcum powdering your ass?”

(AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

The Rally of the Living Dead.

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Again, sometime the best effect require no PhotoShop skills. And I think we are pretty close to understanding his campaign’s vetting process.

(AFP/Jim Watson)

What song are they playing for Mad Dog to do his turn on the cat walk?

Time’s up, Number 2 pencils down. Answers in the comments, please.