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Sunday, April 29, 2018

Dinner for Schmucks

As it does every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner serves as a reminder that while individual journalists might be fine people, collectively they pretty much all fucking suck, are terrible at their jobs, and should be replaced at the earliest possible moment. Michelle Wolf did the two things a comedian is supposed to do, which is be funny and tell the truth, and if the truth is ugly, whose fucking fault is that?

Consider:  at the same exact moment Wolf smacked up the crowd with a few "[Clownstick] is so broke" yo momma jokes, and threw the lightest of shade at Baghdad Barb's overdone mascara, the so-called leader of the free world was at an indoor soccer field in Bumfuck, Michigan reciting his usual list of lies and calumniations, calling everyone who disagrees with him -- including journamalists -- traitors and enemies of the state. (That the pearl-clutching took some attention away from the magat rally is one small bright point.) So of course Wolf is the problem.

We have a real situation here, folks. If anyone can be characterized categorically as "enemies of the state," it is indeed the corporate media, from CNN to MSNBC to Fox to the NY Times and WaPo. Certainly the degrees of severity vary, and outlets such as the Post have made the effort to include some diamonds among the dross.

But consider Maga Haberman's whinging tweet about how poor Baghdad Barb was forced at gunpoint to sit there and "absorb intense criticism" about things that are objectively true. The only thing Wolf said about Barb's physical appearance was a throwaway line about "smoky eye," and as far as the critique on Barb's job performance, Wolf barely grazed her.

Haberman, of course, thinks she's being "objective" when she sticks up for Baghdad Barb. I honestly don't know why she doesn't just jump over to Fox News and have done with it.

Wolf could have gone much meaner and deeper. Obviously any WH press secretary for any administration is going to be something of a hack and a shill, dutifully sweeping various shenanigans under the nearest thing resembling a rug. But let's stop fucking around here -- Sarah Sanders has taken the job to a new low, aggressively lying and obfuscating for an administration that has richly earned (in barely a year) its multiple investigations and reputation for incompetence and corruption.

Sanders is an active, willing accomplice to their daily efforts to undermine this nation and pit its citizens against each other, while the clown-in-thief and his cronies nose each other along the public trough. She's the closest thing this country has to an out-and-out traitor; she's done far more damage than the likes of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning could ever conceive. Calling Sanders "Baghdad Barb" in this here blog is about as polite as I can get when talking about her, a chuckling wink that only barely alludes to the depth of my contempt for her.

Sean Spicer was and is an asshole, but his main problem during his stint as Depress Suckaterry was that he too frequently, through his body language and facial tics, gave away what he really thought of the whole shitshow. Sanders, on the other hand, is all in on this thing, as they say. She's not acting in order to meet basic job requirements. She'd do this for free; the fact that she's well-compensated for it is just gravy. She enjoys rubbing the noses of the librul mediots and their librul snowflake readers in as much shit as possible. She's about as much of a good christian as Saddam Hussein. Any god that would be okay with her constant lying, and her shameless defenses of the indefensible, is not a deity worth taking seriously.

There's no need to make cheap remarks about her physical appearance -- her soul is as deformed and fugly as they come. Twitter Nixon had her number right from the start, when he said something to the effect that she looks like she's spent plenty of time over the years defending her brother.

Things have gotten progressively worse since that doddering monster waddled down the fucking escalator three interminable years ago, yet the mediots insist on doing things the way they've always done them. Their revenue model is dying, and they don't know what to do, so they don't do anything differently. We all know what that's a recipe for, and it's coming true, as expected.

They like to pride themselves on being neutral objective observers, but they're not, and the WHCD is annual proof of that. Their currency is access, the uncool kids doing whatever it takes to get invited to the kewl kids' party, even though once they get in, everybody hates them all the same. And I don't blame the people in power one bit for hating the media monkeys. I despise them as well.

It's a free country and all, but no one respects someone who eats shit and sucks hobo dicks, like some desperate Fear Factor moron, just to get in the room with a bunch of unqualified thieves and grifters, just so they can swill appletinis with them and transcribe the lies. As nasty as Wolf might been to Sanders and that fucking scumbag she carries water for, she saved her sharpest arrows for the mediot sellouts picking at their monkfish at their corporate-sponsored "see and be seen" tables.

And she still went easy on them. There's no two ways about this -- the media, with their horse-race bullshit and their stupid Cletus safaris and their fucked-up senses of objectivity and priorities, are collectively responsible for the mess we're all in now. This has been building for a long time, and all it took was a career con-man with a long and formidable track record of gulling credulous journamalists every fucking time into taking his calls and stenographing his lies and conspiracy theories and moronic barstool-drunk jabber. He's been playing them like a cheap accordion for decades, and they don't even seem to mind. Whatever gets them clicks and eyeballs, that's really all they care about.

Certainly their customer base bears plenty of responsibility as well. We're not off the hook by any means. The mediots do what they do because there's enough of us who seek it out, or are at least placated by it.

But it's a symbiotic relationship at best; if the media became more responsible and improved their coverage and reportage, the idiots would head for the usual fast-food options of epistemic affirmation, but the people who want quality and have given up on that hope would be back to support such an effort.

And it all starts with these assholes stopping the pretense that they can hang out and party with the people they need to cover rigorously and objectively. We talk about politicians needing to put country over party. The media need to put country over parties. They don't have to be assholes to the people that they cover, but they can't be their friends, either. There has to be separation. This shouldn't even have to be said, but sadly it does. The idea of "collegiality" has to stop -- they are not colleagues. They're not your fucking friends. Stop pretending that they are.

We're past the point of having some good-natured ribbing between friendly rivals, you dumb motherfuckers. They stole a fucking SCOTUS seat, and their golem spends half his time calling us traitors, and the other half forcing us to pay him to play golf. And that doesn't even scratch the surface. If the mediots had any real integrity, they'd stop attending this dismal, debased ritual.

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