Terminex Time

Calhoun’s Cannons for November 13 2012

Termites.  Zombie termites.  Whack one over the head and you think that’ll take care of the problem but then you turn around and there he is again, softly munching on the door frame.  

Just like Karl Rove, the brain behind George Bush, the genius behind the Super PAC Crossroads GPS, the darling strategist of the Republicans.  It’s election night on Fox News and Karl was just hit over the head with a huge, thick, heavy book full of numbers; polling numbers, voting numbers, actual facts, and outside-the-bubble reality.  Thwock!

And still Karl wasn’t getting it. Clearly, not getting it.  Instead he was denying those numbers, and rattling off other numbers, happier numbers, Republican numbers that would show his client winning.  Until news anchor Megyn Kelly turned to him and said, right out loud, on air, on Fox News, straight from the belly of the Great Republican BS Bubble Machine, “Is this just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?”

And there it was.  From the mouth of a babe.  Brave, pretty Megyn.  The whole Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly ginned up Republican BS Bubble Machine finally exposed, the Ozian curtain pulled aside to reveal all the termites munching away. “Is this just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?”

And suddenly, the jig was up, that years-long circle jerk of creepy old very well paid white guys (and several helmet-haired skinny blonds with fierce, rictus smiles) stroking and fueling one another with made up crap, pumped up on faux anger, fake numbers, heating themselves up into a sweaty frenzy of wacko conspiracy theories, racial dog whistle music, and Onanistic misogyny – all those Mexicans! Those Sluts! Those blacks who just want stuff! The moochers are coming! The moochers are coming!

Until it all came crashing down around the King of the Universe, gut stuck by pretty little Megyn and the mooching voters.  

Now, in a sane world, Karl, Sean, Rush, O’Reilly, et all would put paper bags over their heads and slink away in disgrace.  Mainstream newspapers would return their Op/Eds with a courteous, cool No Thank You.  Viewers would snort through their noses and change the channel.  But we don’t live in a sane world.  We live in a Zombie Termite world and shortly after Karl’s amazing sputter on election night, there he was in the Murdochian Wall Street Journal, holding forth in all his brazen punditry.  No shame.  No paper bag.  And from Right Wing World, not a guffaw, not even the hint of a snigger at these guys or a demand from sane Republicans for somebody to, please God, get them off the stage – they’re killing us!

Nope, not a bit of it. Instead, Hannity went on the air to rail at voters for voting for Obama, Bill O’Reilly whined about a world filled with people who just “wanted stuff,” and Rush Limbaugh simply had a complete meltdown – off the rails and utterly flummoxed by his self-created cognitive dissonance and blubbering at the prospect that his own privately invented Apocalypse was at hand. 

Then all of them started blaming the media.  And from their Poobah Pundit Lips came not a whisper of a horrifying possibility:  That America had heard all that the Great Right Wing Republican BS Machine had to say and politely said, No Thanks. That there just might be another reality that consisted of voters who were finally onto the Great Con that had been run on them for 30 years by those same pundits.  And that now, busted, their economy looted, their country beggared and themselves dispossessed, they finally woke up and pulled aside the curtain.    

But if you think you’ve seen the last of Rove and all the other discredited “talking heads” on the media circuit, well you’re out of luck.  Karl and the rest won’t go away. Like all the other official go-to yakkers on the Sunday Morning News Gab Fests, they’ve become a permanent fixture, an interchangeable troop of well paid character actors who appear weekly to play Discredited Democratic Hack arguing with Discredited Republican Hack, on what pretends to be a “news” show presided over by another actor pretending to be a “journalist, all interspersed by commercials for Depends and Mountain Dew.  And not a paper bag in sight. Or a Terminex guy.

World without end.  Thwock!