Triumph of the Shrill

Another misunderstood, non-hatespeaking Republiklan

Leni Reifenstahl’s most (in)famous film, “Triumph of the Will” was the Faux Nooz­™ documentary of its day: unapologetically, breathlessly, overwhelmingly partisan, every frame intended to show the majesty of an ugly movement that would eventually leave its high water mark in the Cosmic Guiness Book of World Records (Planet Earth) for sheer brutality, and efficient butchery.

So, look at what the propaganda machine has spewed forth this afternoon:

What an astonishing rebuttal to accusations of rhetorical hooliganism and Nazi-style propaganda by the Snarking Reicht!

Kind of like fucking a child in the ass to refute accusations of child molestation.

I’m not going to be nice, so bail out now if it makes you cry.

I have begun and stopped a dozen posts over the past week, but each time I have been stopped by the “Mister Ed” dictum: People yakety yak the street and waste their time of day, but Mister Ed will never speak unless he has something to say.

Well, pull up a chair, Wilbur. And pass the oats.

If you don’t believe that ABC’s Jonathan Karl is a shill for the Right Wing, just go ahead and listen to him on in Tom Ashbrook’s “On Point” on NPR, which I talked about a couple of days ago (“Do Words Matter?” 14 Jan.) Karl spends his entire time repeating Reicht Ving Talking Points™ about how the poor Princess of Moosylvania was done wronged and suchlike, and only afterwards does one ask one’s self (if one is given to self dialogue during introspective moments): Is this guy a REPORTER?

Or is he a paid operative of the GOP?

All I can tell you is that his kind of sheer partisanship in any public venue would have been grounds for termination in broadcast media only a few years ago.

So, isn’t is a FABULOUS coincidence that Jonathan Karl leads off today’s Republican Kerfluffing of “civility”?

You see, if ANY Democrat ever said anything bad in the history of the world, then they are ALL hypocrites, and the GOP is as pure as the driven snow.

OK: if it’s yellow snow we’re talking about here.

Hi boys!

Look: the point is simple and clear. The ramping up of hate rhetoric IS causing  Sanity-Challenged Americans to take up arms and shoot people.

We’ve had a goddamned week of Palin’s latest “What magazines do you read?” debacle force-fed back down our throats by the Brownshirts of the Reicht, and I suppose my jaw oughtn’t have dropped when the new “sanity” serpent, David Frum, came on MSNBC and simply asserted that “it’s now well-established that Sarah Palin had NOTHING to do with the shootings in Arizona, and was treated unfairly,” and, the “Good Germans” of the tube just kind of nodded YUP, Ghuh huh guh-huh, making that exact same sort of noise that Goofy likes to make before he bumbles into whatever trouble will end with the classic sound effect of the Goofy Holler.

click for holler

I don’t need to preach to the choir about this. You’ve seen it as surely as I. Your idiot neighbor up the street got the latest “viral” propaganda with an old Democratic committee picture with bullseyes, which is immediately made EQUIVALENT to the question in question, and suddenly you’re red-faced trying to explain  your horrible hypocrisy, and you’re bullied into silence about bullying by the bullies.

Fuck that: here’s Joe Goebbels at the Nuremberg Rallies that Leni Reifenstahl filmed (a little cameo)

And here’s Karl Rove who’s now working for Faux Nooz™

And there ain’t no fucking difference. They’re both going to sell you whatever they’re told to sell whether there’s any reality to it or not, The Triumph of the Shill,  and they’re going to stifle and bully critics into silence with brazen sophistries, fallacies and outright lies (because “facts” are mere hindrances, stubborn though they might ultimately be), and the idea that you get to respond is laughable.

(Sure are a lot of Teutonic names associated, now that I think of it, Karl, Luntz, Limbaugh, Beck, et al. Kind of like Nixon’s Teutonic twits, Haldeman, Erlichman, et al.  Just sayin’.)

In the midst of a debate to essentially condemn thousands, if not millions of Americans to premature death (the ‘REPEAL THE JOB-KILLING HEALTH CARE BILL’), one can only wonder at WHY they’re so keen on gravediggers, morticians, embalmers and crematoria operators doing a brisk business.

In the week since the shootings, in some weird campaign to exonerate themselves in the court of public opinion, they’ve only proven the point.

And all the while, while nobody is going to say so: YEAH, they ARE lying just like Josef Goebbels. Whether they murder their own children and take cyanide capsules themselves remains to be seen, but one can always hope.

Because this is EXACTLY what happened in Nazi Germany: a civil nation, a civilized people were turned against one another and bullied into submission by a minority of outright barbarians who rejected the very notion of anyone else having a point of view, or a right to speak — and while they went further with their campaign to demonize the opposition, the difference is only a matter of degree, and not of substance.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder that Michelle Malkin doesn’t just explode into flames, being hysterically and frenetically given to finding the darkest cloud in any silver lining. What’s odd, however, is that, did she truly believe her insane paranoias, she’d shut up (because “they” would find a way to “get” her).

Still, I have no doubt that she sleeps like a newborn babe, untroubled as she is by having no conscience.

Look: I don’t know if anybody’s noticed, but GOVERNANCE is falling apart all over the world, as ancient grudges and vendettas take over for the “rule of law” (which we Americans have so thoughtlessly tarnished and debased over the last decade or so, or don’t you remember the impeachment?), and as Western Democracies are paralyzed by hung Parliaments and split legislatures.

We are facing lo0ming food shortages, water shortages, a spike in worldwide poverty and half of all Americans living virtually at the poverty level. That’s not mentioning the long crisis that climate change is causing/has caused/WILL cause at ever increasing levels of chaos.

We have witnessed the sharks and corporate raiders dismantling American industry and shipping it to cheap (and increasingly unstable) labor markets, finding a loophole in the anti-slavery laws that allows it overseas without acknowledging its formative impact on the less expensive goods that are flooding our markets even as our ability to manufacture basic industrial staples like steel, textiles, shoes, televisions, lights, etc. etc. is vanishing. And now the largest political players are “hedge fund managers” which is a fancy name for “corporate raider” or “professional gambler.” They only buy, sell and dismantle. They do not build or create or manufacture. And look at what our priorities are, as a result.

We have become a cannibalistic Worm Ourbouros: the serpent not only bites its tail — it eats it.

We face a worldwide resource rush, as ever-more-scarce materials become ever more imperative and critical to ever-more-rapacious markets.

Rarely have we seen a world so intrinsically unstable, and when we have, it’s generally presaged war.  World war? Civil war? Sure, why not?

A REAL war. A war where the true horrors are visited on the smug in their manses, as they sip their cappuccinos and inspect their manicured nails.

But while Western Civilization burns, we fiddle. We posture. We labor in the domination enterprises of the schoolyard while the school itself burns to the ground.

Instead of Lord of the Rings, we live out Lord of the Flies, and in this scenario, the thoughtful, the liberal, the serious are Piggy.

Guess who’s playing Jack Merridew?

Consider the value and “people’s right to know” of the following bit of “journalism.”

fiddling about, fiddling about (see the Who)

Listen to crack reporter Jonathan Karl [emphasis added]:

[ABC caption] Jonathan Karl was named ABC News’
senior congressional correspondent in November 2008.

Say What? Democrat Compares Republicans to Nazis

January 19, 2011 1:02 PM
ABC News Jonathan Karl reports:

The newfound civility didn’t last long. Political rhetoric in Congress doesn’t get much nastier than the words of one House Democrat during the debate on repealing the health care law.

In an extraordinary outburst on the House floor, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) invoked the Holocaust to attack Republicans on health care and compared rhetoric on the issue to the work of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels,” Cohen said. “You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That’s the same kind of thing.[" sic] And Congressman Cohen didn’t stop there.

“The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it–believed it and you have the Holocaust. We heard on this floor, government takeover of health care. Politifact said the biggest lie of 2010 was a government takeover of health care because there is no government takeover,” Cohen said.

Cohen made his comments late last night, but they have attracted no attention because his speech was made to a virtually empty House chamber with no reporters around to watch.

Stunningly creepy, and — shall we say? — Goebbelseque.

Whatever Luntz tells us to say, always the SAME talking point.

Now, is that journalism, or is it childish smear by a hack reporter licking the boots of his masters?

Because as near as I can tell, not ONE word that the representative said is untrue — neither historically nor metaphorically. We ARE on a slippery slope, and the departure from White House grounds of the Bushies hasn’t slowed the march to fascism — LITERAL fascism, in Mussolini’s formulation of the marriage of State and Business interests — one whit.

Or, in the case of Jonathan Karl, one half-wit.

But blame must be placed properly at the mute refusal of the Eloi to stand up to GOP Morlocks, and it is, in more than a metaphorical sense, the silence of the lambs. This time, it is US who are the “Good Germans.”

“Well done, my minions”

“I know you are but what am I?” is a trope worthy of Pee Wee Herman for entertainment purposes, but it is NOT a legitimate form of political debate.

Would SOMEBODY please start acting like a grownup here?

I mean, it is a lousy start to the 112th Congress that they begin with a censorious, poorly staged pageant of reading (sort of) the Constitution (most of it, at least) and then proceed to a completely meaningless vote to “repeal Obamacare.”

While their Brownshirts stomp anyone with the temerity to protest.

Puttin’ on the Ritz

Well, babies, if the jackboot fits, wear it.

It is the Triumph of the Shrill.

Courage.

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