Mainstream Media To GOP: “You Complete Me”

After the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot exchange that was our nation’s one and only vice-presidential election debate for the season, the Huffington Post wasted no time in releasing a fact-check video against Trumpian shoeshine boy Mike Pence, showing the astounding number of times he denied that Trump ever said anything bad or disparaging or crude about anyone ever:

It’s shocking, it’s funny, it’s absurd, and most importantly: it will not change one fucking thing.
 
Go ahead: show the to your crazy Uncle Liberty (or whomever stands in as the lunatic teabagger in your life) and see what they have to say about Pence’s pack of lies.
 
Watch in horror as the “come to Jesus” moment you were hoping would happen if you just made the right argument — and this one will totally be the one! — wither and die in the face of rabid, psychotic ignorance. 
 
Then stand there, dumbfounded, as Uncle Liberty hitches up his coveralls, spits in your commie pinko liberal eye, and plugs the conservative media feeding tube back into his temporal lobe, so he can continue signing the hymns of Reverend Limbaugh over the corpse of Saint Ronnie in blissful, fanatical peace. 
 
There are three things in this world that the gibbering lunatic groundlings of the conservative movement give absolutely zero fucks about:

1. Facts
2. (Objective) truth
3. Liberals

Multiple generations of conservative cult leaders have thoroughly convinced the base that listening to the likes of people like you and I is not only tantamount to treason, but that refusing to do so and watching us twist in the wind over it is the key to victory for their merry band of idiots and wingnuts and bigots. The only thing they care about is how good at making face their spokespeople are, and how hard their hippie punches are connecting. All the videos, articles, and podcasts in the world will never change that. 
 
So why bother making a video like this at all, you might ask? It’s a comforting thought to believe that HuffPo has a vested interest in setting the record straight, and that once the accumulated list of Republican degradations against the American people becomes suitably tomelike, it will shame the party of Lincoln into humble submission. Nothing could be further from the truth.
 
There are three things the Huffington Post gives a great many fucks about:

1. Clicks
2. Shares
3. Advertisers

And videos like this one go a long way toward satisfying all three.
 
Sanctimonious preaching to the choir keeps the ratings up, especially as we get closer to Election Day. The more good and well-meaning liberals keep plugging into 24-hour coverage of Donald Trump’s Shock And Awe presidential campaign, the more money media outlets like The Huffington Post stand to make and not pay their writers with. Convincing you that sharing supercuts of douchebags like Mike Pence doling out mouth-poo in front of a live studio audience actually makes a difference in the discourse is part of their strategy. Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington is off in Davos with David Brooks getting Ashiatsu massages from tiny Korean women, and laughing all the way to the bank.

The only way to stuff monsters like Mike Pence and Donald Trump back into their cages is by cattle-prodding them live on air every time they make outlandish assertions about Mexican rapists or death panels or the Kenyan Usurper or any of the other horseshit fabrications they create on a regular basis, and to share that with their roiling mass of supporters to demonstrate what feckless weaklings their thought leaders are. 
 
Like a mongrel dog, you can’t rub Trump’s nose in the shit he left on the rug when you find it the next day; you have to watch him and do it the instant it happens, or he’ll swear up and down to his friends at the hydrant that the cat did it. And they’ll believe him, because he’s such a good boy. 
 
As much as I’d like to commend The Huffington Post for their work in this instance, I’ve never been one to celebrate mediocrity, let alone complicity. And I’m not about to start now.