Chapter 5: In Which The Punditocracy Finally Realizes It's Been Had

Some truly extraordinary television this evening, as we watched the Serious People of the Washington punditocracy finally stop trying to put an evening gown, heels, pearl earrings, and a diamond-encrusted tiara upon the pig that is George W. Bush's presidency.

Olbermann was in the kind of fine form that we have come to expect, but the big surprise was Chris Matthews, who could barely contain his disgust at what we were about to hear from the Codpiece-in-Chief. It's hard to have a lot of sympathy for Tweety, given that he's the same guy who used to say things like:

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically [...], the president deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That [...] if you're going to run against him, you'd better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[...]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here's a president who's really nonverbal. He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

[...]

MATTHEWS: The president there -- look at this guy! We're watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he's flown --

CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.

MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him -- I mean, he seems like -- he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

and

MATTHEWS: We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits. We don't want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.

...and having learned absolutely nothing, now talks about the equally incoherent dim bulb that is Fred Thompson like this.
Matthews looked this evening like a wife who's just learned that her husband is fucking the kids' nanny; that same mix of betrayal, embarrassment and shame. Tim Russert looked like someone who had just seen pictures of himself in a compromising position with a mule on YouTube.

Over on CNN after MSNBC signed off for some of its post-prime-time Very Important Programming about some sleazeball criminal or another, Candy Crowley made her expected dig that the opponents of this war are all partisan Democrats, but I thought Michael Ware's head was going to explode as he went down the litany of Dire Consequences™ that were certain, according to the Fuckup-in-Chief, to follow a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, pointing out that all of these consequences are happening now.

I'll have video as soon as I can find some. You see, I don't have a TV tuner in my PC, and even if I did, I don't have a wire to our Dish in our home office. So I have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

I'd like to believe that the utter disaster for this country that this president outlined tonight represents some kind of wastershed, a collective moment in which the talking heads of the media realize just what they've been aiding and abetting for the last six years since the 9/11 attacks. And perhaps they'll surprise me. There was no snark about Sen. Jack Reed's rebuttal. They were even kind to John Edwards, who bought two minutes of ad time because it's the only way he can get any face time on television to ask Congress to please look between its legs and find its balls and do something to stop the Madness of King George:

But somehow I think we'll wake up tomorrow, and everyone will be back on message, that this president is "steadfast and resolute", that the 60+ percent of Americans who have had enough are just a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkey traitors, and that John Edwards got an expensive haircut.