Politics When the Media Shrugs

Driftglass makes an excellent observation:

What happened this week was that the GOP finally dropped its last fig-leaf and with it, any pretense of a conscience.

In 2004, the Cheney Administration offered the imbeciles, cowards and bigots who despised this country enough to re-elect the worst president in American history an ample supply of flags and bibles and "Boot in their ass"-themed country music behind which they could hide when called upon to justify their truly spectacular desecration of every American value they purported to admire.

Granted the rationalizations that the Party of Personal Responsibility offered up were patently ridiculous, but as always they Right found that if they just backed their phony excuses up by screaming "Why do you hate America?!" loud enough, the sheer decibel level of their lies could blot out any reasonable attempt to rebut them.

Now:

This time, the Party of God has left them nothing. Not a shred of ideological camouflage. Not a single economic entrenching tool with which to dig themselves a plausible spider hole. Nothing.

And this is what changed. 2010 will go down as the year that the lies which have sustained the Right for 40 years finally got too ridiculous and top-heavy to be maintained, and the GOP just gave up pretending that it is anything other than a cesspit of thieves and fascists and lunatics.

And the media shrugged.

After two years of constant lying and intractable, public, reactionary opposition to everything in the name of nothing but clawing their way back to power over the corpse of the American Dream, 2010 became the year the Right got tired of half measures, pulled out a gun, jammed it right in the face of national security, the United States military, the poor, 9/11 first responders, the families of those blown to bits by BP, and the unemployed and shrieked "Gimme the money! "Gimme the money! Just gimme the fucking money!"

And the media smirked.

This isn't limited to Fox News either. What I don't understand is that the movement conservatives are an amazing caterwauling freak show. Telling people just how bugshit lunatic they are is actually good TV (ask Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert). Here's the Republican who's going to take over the Housing Banking committee, Spencer Baucus:

"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks," he said.

If Fox can gin up controversy over the stupid fucking 'War Against the Jews, Muslims, and the ACLU on Christmas', somebody should be able to run with this, right?

Unlike arcane arguments about legislative minutiae, what the Republicans say, day in and day out, is so damn nutty that you could actually 'get eyeballs' with it.

I have little faith in the decency or the responsibility of the corporate news media, but I always thought that a good story was good for business. Guess I was wrong.