General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYou Can't Bully These Motherf---ers
When I write that CNN politics writer Chris Cillizza is the rankest assbrain in the Western Hemisphere, I am not being nice to him. When I write that God clowned Chris Cillizza before he was born by making him Chris Cillizza instead of a shit-eating maggot, I am being unkind. When I say that Chris Cillizza himself is the punchline to the cruelest work of absurdist comedy in the history of the fucking universe, and that the title of that work is On the Origin of Species, I am being mean. Likewise it probably is downright nasty for me to write that on the whole American society would benefit greatly by Chris Cillizza being fired out of a large cannon into an even larger cliff face. But I am not bullying Chris Cillizza. Categorically, I cannot do that.
Wolfs treatment of Sanders was bullying, Cillizza wrote on CNNs website yesterday, because he is an obsequious slimeball even more slovenly with language than his forebears were in the dispensation of their chromosomes. Hes referring to the standup set Michelle Wolf, a comedian, performed at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night, somewhat at the expense of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a brazen, knowing, and hugely powerful enemy of the free press and deceiver of the public by trade. As youve surely read by now, Wolf joked that Sanderss makeupher perfect smoky eyeis made of the ashes of the facts she burns.
Thats about as gentle a way as anyone could come up with to lampoon the single most relevant fact about Sanders and what brought her to a station in life that would make her a reasonable subject of lines in a White House Correspondents Dinner monologue in the first place. A frank and honest description of who she is and what she does would be much more harsh: Every day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders plants herself, by choice, between the public and the facts of whats being done at the very highest levels of American executive power, and does her damnedest to break and delegitimize the means by which the two are brought together. She is one of the most visible and powerful people in American civic life, and she uses her visibility and powershe chooses to use her visibility and powerto confuse the public and degrade its grasp on the truth, rather than to inform or empower or serve it. Her willingness to do this on behalf of Donald Trump, day after day, and the unmistakable teeth-gnashing relish with which she does it, are the substance of her power, and the reason why anybody knows who the fuck she is at all. What history will remember about Sanders is that she is the scum of the fucking earth, and not the jokey means by which one comedian pointed out this inarguable factand thats only if the senile rageaholic pissbaby moron on whose behalf she shames herself on television every day doesnt annihilate the human race, first.
It should surprise no one that Cillizza, an amoral rat whose professional existence, like Sanderss, is predicated entirely on cynical indifference to truth or fact or consequence, would recoil at that indifference being the subject of vocal scorn, or at the possibility of that scorn receiving praise from any sector of the public. The possibility that there might be even as mild a social tax as a hired comedian firing a few acerbic but harmless owns in your direction attached to the business of cosseting and flattering entrenched power must be scary for him, because he is a coward and because, if the well-earned opprobrium of actual real human beings can penetrate the social strata hes spent his life sliming his way into, it implies he might get his literal fucking head chopped off somewhere down the line, and that people will be broadly okay with that. But it isnt bullying. Michelle Wolf cant bully Sarah Huckabee Sanders any more than I can bully Chris Cillizza.
Bullying happens along a gradient of existing power and reiterates it. Thats the difference between bullying and a fair fight: The bully is bigger and stronger and safer, and wields those advantages over someone smaller and weaker and more vulnerable. Michelle Wolf got off some zingers at Sarah Huckabee Sanderss expense at an ultra-exclusive social event entirely filled by people whose livelihoods Sanders holds in her hands. Beyond that, as a basic function of her job, Sanders enjoys access to the water main of American political consciousness unmatched by pretty much any living person not named Donald Trumpa privilege she uses only and entirely for the purpose of pumping poison into it, aided by a healthy plurality of the people in that room but not by Michelle Wolf. I doubt there is a forum in existence in which Wolf could do anything that would qualify as bullying the press secretary of the President of the United States, but even if there is, the fucking White House Correspondents Dinner isnt it.
This isnt only a semantic point. It gets right to the heart of what makes Chris Cillizza an almost inconceivably atrocious and failed human being. Bullying is a real thing with real consequences; by definition, its victims need help from those with the power to give it. Arranging the events of Saturday nights awful scumbag party such that the relatively unknown truth-voicing comedian is the bully and the vastly powerful press secretary is the victim provides a rhetorical basis for Chris Cillizza, himself the holder of an exclusive and relatively powerful station in American political life, to do what he always does and always has: give aid to the powerful at the expense of the weak. That its a false and dishonest basis matters less to Cillizza than to perhaps any other living person. To even accuse him of knowing its bullshit would be to grant, in the absence of any evidence, that he has any concept of truth in the first place.
You cant bully these people. Its simply not possible. You can only smash and annihilate every trace of the structures that empower them.
...
https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/you-cant-bully-these-motherfuckers-1825648283
dalton99a
(81,526 posts)unblock
(52,257 posts)I don't even smoke and I need a cigarette after that one!
greatlaurel
(2,004 posts)Great article! Thanks for posting.
greatlaurel
(2,004 posts)I liked this quote, too.
"Arranging the events of Saturday nights awful scumbag party such that the relatively unknown truth-voicing comedian is the bully and the vastly powerful press secretary is the victim provides a rhetorical basis for Chris Cillizza, himself the holder of an exclusive and relatively powerful station in American political life, to do what he always does and always has: give aid to the powerful at the expense of the weak."
Follow the link this is a great article!
Thanks for the link!
DemocratSinceBirth
(99,710 posts)longship
(40,416 posts)That's the only way ever there was to describe him.
(Unless one wants to add a second descriptor, e.g., Chris Cillizza is a tool fool!. Yup! That's it.)
Rainbow Droid
(722 posts)oasis
(49,392 posts)Initech
(100,081 posts)BobTheSubgenius
(11,564 posts)...I actually think less of him now. Thank you for allowing me to explore some outer reaches of a few of my various emotions.
SunSeeker
(51,574 posts)cp
(6,640 posts)Hekate
(90,717 posts)This is a fantastic essay.
Response to Hekate (Reply #13)
DemocratSinceBirth This message was self-deleted by its author.