Quote of the Day, Jr.

"He's like a character in a Bruce Willis movie. He just knows how to stay alive. He's running through the jungle, fighting back, shooting from the hip, takes a lot of hits, stays angry the entire time, and he is giving a voice to a lot of people out there whose lives have been completely upended."

-- Tom Brokaw on Rick Santorum, during MSNBC's coverage of the Republican primaries last night

Where to even being. It's this kind of nonsense that frustrates the hell out of anyone looking for intelligent, responsible political reportage and analysis on cable news. No, Tom, Santorum isn't like a character in a movie, nor is he a horse in a race; he's very real and his rhetoric and proposed policies have the potential to impact the entire country. And the people he's largely giving a voice to -- the ones whose lives have been "upended," mostly by the frightening march of progress -- are those who believe that we need to return to the 19th century when it comes to our politics and pervading beliefs on subjects like religion and women's rights. He says the separation of church and state makes him sick, that a college education is for snobs and those willing to be indoctrinated by liberal thinking, and that Satan, the father of lies, is behind this country's troubles. But instead of parsing the policies and views of a man running for President of the United States and the way they could affect each and every one of us, Brokaw can only sit back and marvel at Santorum's supposedly ferocious tenacity.

This is why no one with a mildly functional brain gives a shit about anything the TV news networks have to say about politics anymore.

Yeah, Tom -- Santorum is like a character in a Bruce Willis movie. He's Brad Pitt's delusional mental patient Jeffrey Goines from 12 Monkeys. And if you don't have the balls to at least notice that because you're too busy clinging to some horseshit illusion of objectivity, then no one should be listening to you.

De-press-ing

I realize I'm kind of outsourcing the commentary right now. That's mostly because I'm busy as hell but also because there's so much good stuff already being written and said about this ridiculous debt deal. Like my BFF Jason Linkins's excellent excoriation of the political press currently running over at HuffPo.

"Way back when this whole saga started, the GOP's gambit was, 'Give us what we want or we will put the full faith and credit of U.S. Treasury bonds into default.' It shouldn't have been necessary to point out to the press that this was an utterly insane, from-the-furthest-reaches-of-Mars position to take. After all, the debt ceiling had been raised many, many times before, without any fuss worth mentioning. If you cannot say objectively that threatening to blow up the world's economy was an extreme position, then the word 'objectivity' is meaningless.

But far from taking an immediate stand against the insanity, the press treated the threatened demise of global society as just another interesting point of view among many. It was an exciting tactic, sure to cause waves in the political waters of the Imperial City. Pop some popcorn and let's see where this takes us! Well, where it's taken us is 'past the brink.' Our political culture has been permanently altered. It has now been deemed an acceptable tactic, in politics, to take hostages and make demands.

It's utterly bonkers. And the press just thinks it's genius! ...

Well... they should own this great mess. The media has ENDORSED: default threats on the American people as a means of making policy. The media has ENDORSED: a permanent state of governmental dysfunction. The media has ENDORSED: their own absolution in failing to adequately cover the unemployment crisis.

And their message to you? 'Kiss our ass, America. You're on your own.'"

He pegs this piece off of a typically self-indulgent discussion that David Gregory had the other day with NBC anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw in which Brokaw honestly said something so unbelievably out of touch with reality and laden with phony objectivity that, as Linkins says, I found myself questioning whether he'd finally lost his mind.