The Visitors, Now With Extra Ronna McDaniel

With the hiring of Eva Braun-Nose by NBC/MSNBC -- 

NBC hires former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who has demonized the press and refused to acknowledge Biden was fairly elected

-- I am moved once again to tell you of The Visitors, which began life as a Monty Python sketch 55 years ago, but has become an eerily accurate parable about the colonization of the mainstream media by recently-former Republicans.

This is from me, a year ago ("Boom Times At The Absolution Factory Redux") which, in turn, is an update to a thing a wrote three years ago:

...Also the title of Sykes' Bulwark podcast today is:

Will Saletan: Welcome to the Resistance, Bill Barr

And so we arrive at the place where I warned we would end up and I never wanted to be.  Smack in the middle of Monty Python's The Visitors sketch.

First, Never Trumper Arthur Name ("Name by name but not by nature") bulldozes his way into the party and begins rearranging things to his liking.

Then the doorbell rings and...

Arthur Name: I'll get it.  That'll be friends of mine  I took the liberty of inviting them along.

And hey look!  It's Chris Christie!  And right behind him, Bill Barr!  

And so on, and so on, and so on.

And before you know it, we Democrats aren't calling the shots anymore.  In fact, we've become  unwelcome guests in our own fucking home because this is now the "Never Again Trump" Republican Reputation Rehabilitation and Normalization Project.

And if you Liberals have a problem with that, well then go ahead and scribble about it on your silly little blogs.  

There are still blogs, right?  

Because now that the American political media has been completely colonized by a handful of Never Trumpers, well golly kid, there doesn't seem to be any room left at the Adult's Table for whiny Liberal dissenters like you...

At the end of The Visitors' sketch, the intruders, who have now completely taken over the house, just shoot the homeowner when he objects and then sing a song over his dead body.

Which hasn't happened IRL yet.

But I trust you get my point.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Welcome Back to the Republican “Splunge” Campaign of 2016

All Hands On Dreck. 

 From The New York Times, August 24, 2023:

What a Few Seconds of Hand Raising Said About Trump’s G.O.P.

With a halting series of raised hands, candidates on the Republican debate stage illustrated the former president’s hold on the party.

It was a moment the eight Republican candidates on the stage in Milwaukee should have known was coming. Though the question took an hour to arrive, they still seemed unsteady in their response:

If Donald Trump is the party’s nominee for president as well as a convicted criminal, will they still support him?...

The answers — and the way they were given — provided one of the most memorable tableaus of the first debate of the Republican primary season. The 17-second exchange showed how completely Mr. Trump’s shadow lingers over the Republican Party and its electorate, which has been unwilling to abandon the former president and has turned hostile to anyone who does.

The former president stands accused criminally in four cases, including on charges of trying to subvert the will of the American people to steal an election that he lost.

As grave as those accusations are, many members of the audience who gathered in Milwaukee, the largest city in one of the country’s most politically contested states, cheered loudly as, one by one, hands rose in fealty to their quadruply indicted champion, a day before he was to turn himself in at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta for fingerprinting and a mug shot...

From The Hill, seven year ago, on August 16, 2016:

GOP senator: I’ll vote for Trump, but I won’t endorse him

New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R) says that while she can “work with anyone,” she will vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump for president.

“While he has my vote, he doesn’t have my endorsement,” Ayotte told CNN’s Manu Raju Monday. “There’s actually a big distinction. An endorsement is one where I’m out campaigning with someone. I’m going to continue to focus, really, on my race.”

Yes we are now fully back to the Republican "Splunge" campaign of 2016.  

From me back then:

Support-But-Not-Endorse is the new Splunge

From Brother Charlie Pierce:

...

[Republican leaders] know that He, Trump has exposed the dark and beating heart of both modern conservatism and the electoral success of the modern Republican Party. They can no more distance themselves from it totally as they can distance themselves from their own hearts. So they support, but don't endorse, and assume people are too dim to notice that the proposition is absurd on its face.

Splunge (h/t Monty Python) is one of the greatest and least used words of all time. It is a nonsense syllable used by yes-men, toadies and other species of spineless careerist who desperately want to both look decisive and suck up to a boss whose incoherently oscillating opinions and wild mood swings they cannot predict or control.

Continue Burning The Lifeboats

The Voice of Empire, Ctd.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down.

"He was nae so much a man as...

a blancmange!" Edition

So "Meet the Gregory" will be off next week so NBC can cover Wimbledon.

Leaving one to ask the question: Why does NBC love tennis more than America?

To absolutely no one's surprise, today at the Mouse Circus the embargo on putting actual Liberals on teevee continued for the God-knows-how-manyeth week. Congratulations, Mainstream Media! You have now rendered Liberals more invisible on Major Network Political Teevee than African Americans were on the openly-segregated American teevee of the 1950s.

Instead we get Matt Bai.

We get George Will,


We get David Fucking Brooks.

Reassuring, in a way, that they no longer feel the need to even pretend to care anymore. That they have obligingly drawn the battle lines between us and them so unmistakably bright and clear.

In very much the same vein, the word has obviously come down from Villager Central Command that everybody needed to shut up and be cool about the fact -- the terrifying, irrefutable fact -- that the GOP is now just stone fucking Natural Born Killah crazy. To immediately button their fucking pie holes about the by-now-excruciatingly obvious/ criminally reckless insanity of the Right, and reassure everyone over and over again that the GOP is not a dark carnival of freaks and End Timers and weasely little Cantors. Not a cultural dumpster swarming with meth-tweaked rats who are perfectly willing to crash the global economy and drive the United States into an entirely preventable Second Republican Great Depression in order to promote the agenda of their fascist billionaire backers, advance their individual political fortunes, blow the country out from under the Kenyan Usurper, get rid every last trace of the New Deal and the Great Society. trigger the Rapture, or just up their speaking fees.

So why are the major networks lying to you -- badly -- in this specific way?

Well you must understand that a blancmange impersonator and Republican has to use some pretty clever stories to allay suspicion.

On the other hand, if you are hungry for real, intelligent, political conversation that covers topics of actual importance, you should of course fire up your computer machines and listen to "The Professional Left". But you should also hie yourself over to the "Liberal Oasis" and lend an ear to this week's interview with Matt Lewis about his book "The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words" which I think gets the importance of the rise of the Scintilla from Wasilla just about right.

Palin is not only not going to win the GOP Presidential Wingnut Sweepstakes, she is almost certainly not even going to run. This is where Imperial Media, LLC coverage of Palin starts and stop, because our Imperial Media's job is to completely miss the real significance of just about everything. Every. Single. Time.

Palin's real importance is that she has found the weakest point in the vast, jelly-soft underbelly of our failed politico-entertainment complex and is gleefully slashing into it with a giddy fame-drunk grifter enthusiasm. She is changing the rules at the intersection of celebrity, politics and media among the Pig People in a knives-out way not seen since the days of George Wallace

and "Settin' the Woods on Fire".

And it is precisely because the Palin phenomenon reveals far too much about the real, ignorant, hateful heart of the Right that the lazy, overpaid "Both Sides Do It" clowns who populate the Mouse Circus are never going to talk about it.

Hateful, Friendless Crackpot

Commandeers global media.

So first we get a vicious, Bible-whanging grifter named "Palin" that for utterly mercenary reasons the press will not stop blathering about.

Then we get a vicious, Bible-whanging grifter named "Terry Jones" that for utterly mercenary reasons the press will not stop blathering about.

May we assume the next monstrosity to grab a Bible and come slouching out of the Right's collective unconscious and into wall-to-wall, 24/7 media coverage will be named

"John Cleese"?

Teabagger Leader Addresses Thousands:

Calls for a return to "National Bocialist Party" values.

Later, reporters gauge the reactions of Average Americans ™.