SemiConscious Dot Org

Last November’s glorious Election Day Rout has obviously had many laudable effects on our country, but one of the most viscerally satisfying has been the increasing marginalization and irrelevancy of the Republican Punditocracy. This gang of shrill, vindictive right-wing barking heads has seen their influence on the nation’s political agenda drop precipitously. As the American viewing/voting public belatedly wakes up to the fact that the past twelve years of Republican electoral dominance have been an unmitigated disaster for this country on every conceivable level, they’re beginning to turn on the lying whores who sold them this rancid bill of goods in the first place.

Fox News, the Politburo for undiluted Republican propaganda, has seen its ratings stall badly, relative to other cable news networks, in the past year. And politicians are finally beginning to notice. Just this week, John Edwards essentially told Murdoch’s Morlocks to go fuck themselves:

“We believe there’s just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending they’re objective,” said Jonathan Prince, Edwards’ deputy campaign manager.

Perhaps in frustration over their increasing irrelevancy, the gasbag pundits at “We Distort, You Comply” have taken to such desperate tactics as intentionally misquoting the results of their own polls and getting into screaming matches with one another on the air. I eagerly await the next level of spectacle that will inevitably ensue when the coverage of this event wears off. Is it too much to hope for to see O’Reilly and Geraldo breaking chairs over each other’s heads next time?

The problem is that, the further we get into the squalid depths of the Punditocracy, the shriller and more vile the expressed sentiments get, the more immune to criticism the pundits become. Take, for instance, the truly loathsome Don Imus, who this week referred to the members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” on his radio show. (Mind you, this isn’t even remotely the nastiest thing he’s ever said on the air.) The seething racism and limited cranial capacity of Imus’ core audience virtually assures that he won’t suffer any lasting consequences for his words. Calling him a racist douchebag and demanding his removal from the public airwaves merely heightens the resentment and loyalty of his listeners. After all, when someone’s actually managed to convince themselves that white male Christians constitute an oppressed minority in modern-day America, it’s clear they’re long past reasonable discourse.

Perhaps the best response to these bloviating shit balloons is a more subtle form of mockery. There’s no real point in calling, say, Ann Coulter a shrieking fascist harpie, so why not satirize her instead? This method is exemplified by this recent editorial, which reimagines Coulter as a “stealth liberal,” and her most unhinged writings as brilliant Swiftian satire intended to discredit conservatives.

Sadly, despite their current travails, the Asshats will make a comeback. They always do. There will always be that 25-30 percent of the American voting public immune to all logic, reason, and common sense, and motivated primarily by fear, stupidity, paranoia, and deep resentment of anyone unlike themselves. These people generally behave like a pack of enraged baboons cooped up in a zoo cage, and the job of Fox News and its ilk is to come by every day with a bucket of raw red meat to throw at them. Unfortunately, we can’t reasonably expect that they will ever grow up and become anything other than dangerous yahoos.

But we can make damn well sure we never get fooled into putting them in charge again.