That’s the recurring theme of our politics, it seems like. Florida starts purging the voter rolls until told to stop by the DOJ – will everyone be legit in time for the Florida primary? Who knows? Fox makes its own campaign ad to slam the President and runs it twice on Fox and Friends, then says they will deal with the producer privately. It’s the same problem as when the papers blast something in the headlines and then run the corrections buried on A14 somewhere. And today, this very day, a “reporter” for Tucker Carlson’s “newspaper” – which, inexplicably, has press pool access – actually has the gall to interrupt the President of the United States – twice – and then walk out of the presser, live on cable news. Which, of course, he knew would be carrying the whole thing. I expect some sort of pro forma statement of regret from the Daily Caller in a couple of days, by which point its reporter will be the toast of the conservative world as a bold unafraid truth-telling hero instead of the asshole douche he is.
I know exactly how this works. Of course I do, hell, I had a little brother growing up. I have almost half a dozen nephews now. I have plenty friends with kids. And everyone’s seen it at some point – the age-old move where the kid takes a swing at somebody or shoves his sister or grabs the toy out of somebody’s hand and immediately reflexively blurts “SORRY” at the first sign of adult notice. (Makes me wonder how I didn’t beat the hell out of my brother more than the one time I did, when he wrenched my knee and inadvertently caused me to have surgery 21 years later, but I digress…)
This is of a piece with my theory of modern electoral politics: the GOP has become the Bully Party. You see it in the opposition to anti-bullying laws, you see it in the likes of SB1070 in Arizona or HB56 in Alabama, you see it in the shenanigans of the Foster Frieses of the world. The ethos is simple: be the bully or be the bullied. And that’s why it’s so critical they win – because they assume the whole world shares this outlook, and if we don’t bully the Middle East and Russia and China and the homos and the wetbacks and the hairy-leg feminists, they’re going to bully us, in fact we’re already being bullied because we have to pay for birth control and it’s a crime to beat up gay kids now and why is everything different from how it was in 1954* WAAAAAAAAH!?!?
And it’s only getting worse. Multiple states down South are losing their shit over the library possibly stocking “50 Shades of Gray” (how the worse load of shit fanfic imaginable becomes a bestseller itself says a lot about American intelligence in the 21st century), while the board of Alabama Public Television is firing executives who resisted running Christian Dominionist propaganda on taxpayer-funded channels (god, remember when APT was the first public television statewide network in the country? Too long ago). Now comes word that the same casino magnate who essentially bankrolled the Newt Gingrich campaign zeppelin is now prepared to kick in literally tens of millions of dollars to the primary Romney SuperPAC. Now the rich kids can just beat you to death with a wallet.
But there’s a larger problem, one I’ve mentioned elsewhere: the power of gall. Of blatantly lying – worse yet, lying in a way that everyone KNOWS you’re lying – and defying anyone to call you on it. This isn’t just a GOP political thing – you see it from everybody from Oakland cops to the RIAA to Hollywood studios. You’re entitled to your own opinion, but when you decide you’re entitled to your own facts and insist on them – then what? As I may have blogged before, it’s the problem of the asshole who stands on the train platform under the NO SMOKING sign puffing away on a whole bloody pack of Marlboro Reds – breaking the rules, annoying everyone else, but as soon as you call him on it, you’re the asshole for getting in his business. And then, invariably, people who weren’t really paying attention or are late to the party, who might otherwise decry the smoker, will wash their hands of it by deciding that you’re both assholes, and just walk away from the whole thing. And now you know why the GOP is running and ruining politics. Now you know why there was a Romney campaign bus driving around the site of today’s Obama speech honking the horn. Politics of the douchebag, for the douchebag, and by the douchebag.
So yeah, it’s going to keep coming. It’s going to lie and dare you to say something, it’s going to be “do you know how much money I have”, it’s going to be punch first and then maybe say sorry once you’re knocked down – especially since this is real life and there’s no Daddy to grab them by the arm and stand their ass in the corner until they learn to behave. The problem is that between an indifferent public and an incompetent press, America has a deadbeat dad.
Because in any other era, Neil Munro’s “journalism” career would be done. Instead…just wait.
* Again, nobody ever seems to remember that the workforce was one-third unionized or that the top marginal tax rate was 91% in the 1950s. When you see nostalgia for the old days, it’s for WASP social hegemony, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.