Today In "Both Sides Do It": Chucknado Edition

"Chucknado" Todd would like to go on the record as being indignant that both sides are playing impeachment games.

“I think the White House ought to be embarrassed for how they’re trying to play this. Boehner — the idea he’s saying, ‘We’re not talking impeachment, the lawsuit?’ Please. That’s about placating the impeachment caucus in his own party. This is an embarrassing moment for everyone in Washington. The leaders of both parties, they’re driving away people from the polls, driving people away from politics. This is cynical. It’s ugly. It’s disgusting.”

He would also very much like it if everyone would agree to forget that, since Inauguration Day, 2009, the GOP has never hesitated to use any stabby, explodey club they could lay their little paws on to destroy the Obama Presidency.

As I wrote a long time ago, the GOP has always operated its Pretty Hate Machine like a nuclear reactor with a radioactive base of bigots and imbeciles at the core, Fox News/Hate Radio injecting the propaganda and tweaking the wedge issues that keep that lunatic base super-heated, and all of it covered by a thick goo of David Brooksian "Both Sides Do It" coolant designed to shield the machine from criticism and keep the general public from seeing the naked hate and paranoia that drives the entire enterprise:

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The Liquid Bobo Koolant

The Koolant system that keeps it all from blowing apart at the seams and melting itself back into the masturbatory fever dreams of every wannabe Jefferson Davis circulate a viscous Koolaid-based composite goo made up of 43% David Brooks, 27% Tom Friedman, 23% Tim Russert, 12% Joe Klein and 10% David Broder.

You say that’s 115%? Well f*k you and your fancy, liberal, Jebus-hating elitist “arithmetic” anyway.

If you press your ear to the containment shell you can hear in murmuring through the pipes:

“There are no crazies here.”

“The Southern Strategy is a myth.”

“Ignore Falwell, Dobson, and Reed. They’re Men of Faith.”

“Ignore Schlafly, Limbaugh and Hannity. They’re just firm”

“Ignore Robertson, Perle and Nordquist. They’re just amusingly provocative.”

“Gingrich isn’t a fascist; he’s just ‘controversial’.”

“Coulter isn’t really serious, even though she is the keynote speaker and commands top dollar at national Republican events, Republican media outlets and sold-out Wingnut Christian rallies.”

“That carcinoma spreading across your face. It looks just the Jesus, so you know it can’t be bad for you!”

“The Moderates really run the party.”

“The Center is where all right thinking people should be, despite the fact that in the last 30 years the Right has dragged the Center a million miles into Crazyville.”

“No matter how completely the GOP rapes American values, without a sliver of evidence to support this assertion you should still somehow believe that Liberals are either just as bad or worse.”

“The GOP cares about idiots like you.”

“There is no core in this reactor.”

That’s how it works. Simple, right?. And yet to build this electoral dynamo the Republican Party has had to completely sell out any vestige of principles or soul it once had for dominion over the divided and bitter land it has created. And because of that, there is no “Plan B” if you are a GOP candidate for national office.

Your Party Masters have burned your bridges and salted the Earth behind you, and now there is nothing left for you to do but desperately tunnel deeper into the Hell you have built for yourself.

Which is why John McCain now publicly grovels and kisses the poxy asses of the men who service and steered the Pretty Hate Machine diffidently past the bodies of the dead and dying of NOLA, and gleefully down the blood-tarred, bone-macadamed streets of Iraq. Men who went right after his family -- his wife and children -- and his honorable national service without a second thought when it suited their despicable purposes.

Because the Pretty Hate Machine does not come with a conscience, and it now casts its depraved shadow over their entire Party.

And over the entire nation that Party has seized.

And over the entire world that Party has polluted.

It has become all Means and no Ends but More Power, and as with all power, it comes with a steep price.
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Because despite periodic and frightening bouts with Mussolini-itis, we are not a fascist people by inclination.

...which is why they have to sorta ease into it, one gay bashing, flag burning, pro-torture, intolerant, anti-choice, anti-Science skirmish at a time. No blitzkrieg, but an ambling, “Aw Shucks” Pinochetism that, as you watch it over the course of decades, has marched this country directly and determinedly towards oblivion.
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Thus we stood back in The Year of Our Lord 2006.

Then, a couple of years later as you may recall, Democrats took back the White House with smart and eloquent African-American Eisenhower Republican named Barack Hussein Obama, and the GOP's carefully calibrated batshit containment system blew apart at the seams.

And since this monster that has always been at the heart of the Modern Conservatism finally kicked the lab door of its hinges and began rampaging across the land, there has stopped being a point beyond which they dare not go. They have already shut the government down and played for-real chicken with the debt ceiling because Freedumb! They have already purged their ranks of anyone who thinks "cooperation" is not a dirty word. They already wasted countless months on countless, meaningless votes on base-pandering nonsense while letting the actual, day-to-day job of governance rot. They have already anointed fascists and madmen and demagogues as their leaders. They have already made a meal out of hamstringing the President at every turn and then bitching that he was not moving fast enough. They have already taken every f*cking hammer in their bag to the Affordable Care Act...and then run on the ACA being broken.

We have already long passed the point when Conservatives lost the capacity to stop themselves from lying like junkies and and torching everything they touch like pyromaniacs. This is a party which has filibustered their own bills and disowned their own ideas just to inflict political damage on someone they consider to be The Worst President In History, and yet Chucknado can look into the teevee camera and say with a straight face that somehow, impeaching Barack Obama would be a bridge too far for this mob.

Hell, even internal to Todd's own stupid argument is the acknowledgment that John Boehner's Stupid Lawsuit is nothing but a sop being thrown to the "impeachment caucus" that now make up the overwhelming majority of his party.

According to a YouGov poll taken earlier this month, 89 percent of Republicans think “Barack Obama has exceeded the limits of authority granted a President by the US Constitution,” and 68 percent think there is “justification for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Obama at this time.” Even when given a number of options including “President Obama has abused his powers as president which rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution, but he should not be impeached,” 63 percent still said he ought to be impeached. A CNN poll found a smaller number of Republicans saying Obama should be impeached, but still a majority of 57 percent.

So what exactly does Chuck Toddler think the base will do when the Boehner's Rubber Wingnut Biscuit gets tossed out of court? Wake up? Cool down? Turn off Hate Radio and Fox News having realized that they've gone to far?

Because when the f*ck has that ever happened?

If it were 1860, Shuck Todd would be whining that rumors of slave state secession were nothing but a fundraising trick by the Lincoln campaign.  If it were 1930, he would be reporting that the whole idea of a "Great Depression" was just a gimmick to drive down Herbert Hoover's poll numbers. But it's 2014, and so we find Chuckles contractually and ideologically committed to pretending in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that this is one more "Both Sides" issue rather face the fact that the GOP is now owned and operated by people who would use the Statue of Liberty to sodomize Mount Rushmore if they thought it would bring Barack Obama down:

But the cherry on top of this whole steaming pile of "Both Sider" claptrap?

Harold Fraud Junior's craven me-too-ism and indignation that both sides won't stop messing around and get back to the single most important issue facing Western Civilization today: Corporate tax inversion.

If NBC was worried about when and how to plug on the David Gregory Fiasco, they can stop worrying. If they zapped Team Gregory into the cornfield and air-dropped this band of centrist idiots and Republican flacks onto the set of "Meet the Press" mid-sentence, no one would notice the difference.