We'd Say Chris Cillizza Should Go Fuck Himself, But That Wouldn't Be Very Civil

The entire Beltway media needs to shut the fuck up right about now.

Oh dear, Chris Cillizza, patron saint of expendable thoughts, has come down with a case of the vapors. In fact, it is STAGE FOUR VAPORS:

Not sure why today feels worse to me but it feels like we are further away from each other — and our common humanit… https: //t.co/UUsAaMViLI

— Chris Cillizza (@Chris Cillizza) 1529976225.0 

Cillizza's Twitter for the past day has been chock full of ennui about "Oh no, Donald Trump tweeted a mean!" and "Oh fiddlesticks, Maxine Waters has gone and done the Jonestown Massacre AGAIN." We're just surprised he hasn't had a #HotTake about how it's Hillary Clinton's fault yet. ( Give him time. )

Let's look at Cillizza's column about Maxine Waters, as we feel it's stupid enough that by rebutting it, we can thus rebut all the stupid takes out there about how both sides do it, but it's somehow worse when Democrats do it. (Like this one, in Politico! )

First, Cillizza bemoans that Waters encouraged "harassment," which is incorrect, as she more specifically encouraged public shaming. (We thought Republicans were into that! Also private shaming, for the kinks.) For the record, here is what she said:

Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.

Damn straight, motherfuckers.

But alas, Chris Cillizza, who writes important political columns like "The 55 most over-the-top lines from Donald Trump's South Carolina speech," says Waters and all the rest of us would be wrong to do that, because us lefties are just WILD AND CRAZY when it comes to how we assess Trump:

There is nothing -- and I mean nothing -- that can be said of Trump and those who work for him that would be a bridge too far for many Democratic activists. They hate Donald Trump. They believe he is a racist. A xenophobe. Someone who is using the presidency to enrich himself. The worst President ever. And so on and so forth.

Wouldn't it be silly to believe things like that? Or could it be we believe those things because we FUCKING WATCH TRUMP SAY WORDS WITH HIS MOUTH?

But no, Chris Cillizza says we crazy leftists are untethered from the truth, and as evidence he cites the replies to his own Twitter feed, which don't live up to the standards set by Chris Cillizza, who writes important journalism pieces like "The 16 best responses to my tweet about Hillary Clinton running for office again," a story idea we imagine Cillizza came up with all by himself:

My Twitter feed is filled on a daily basis with liberals insisting that there is nothing too awful to say about Trump, his daughters, his sons or his wife. Whether or not these attacks are fact-based appears to be of little consequence to this element of the Democratic base; they are literally blinded with hatred for Trump.

First of all, we question Cillizza's fact-checking police work, because of the paragraph we posted above, where he dismissively wrote IN THE VERY SAME COLUMN about Democrats believing Trump is a racist and a xenophobe, simply because Trump is 100% verifiably both of those things. But Cillizza goes on to say that tactically this is bad because:

• "Two wrongs don't make a right." (For real, he said that. This is what he gets paid the bucks to write.)

• Maxine Waters encouraging people to make Trump fascists uncomfortable in public is THE SAME as Donald Trump himself "at a rally encouraging the police to rough up a protester." You bet, Cillizza.

Let's be clear here: Trump and his cohort of white nationalist liars aren't deserving of the kind of "civility" reserved for normal political discourse because THEY ARE NOT NORMAL.

The entire point of the resistance to Donald Goddamn Fucking Trump is that he is not normal, by which we mean that he is not anywhere near the realm of "acceptable" when it comes to who an American president should be or how he should behave. He does not revere our Constitution. He believes due process can be thrown out when it serves his white supremacist purposes. He wants to put Central American refugee families in prison indefinitely. He's destroying our alliances with other modern democracies in favor of giving daily rimjobs to autocrats and dictators, especially Vladimir Putin, his favorite dictator of all. He almost certainly conspired with Putin's Russia to steal his election, and if he wasn't directly involved people all over his campaign were. He lies only and always, every time his mouth is open. NONE OF THIS IS OK.

Remember when Trump was elected and people started virally sharing brilliant pieces from folks like Sarah Kendzior about how to survive autocracy? Remember when we said THIS IS NOT NORMAL every five minutes, because to be clear, THIS IS NOT NORMAL? Remember when Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski pulled their heads out of their Trump-loving asses and surveyed the damage of what they had helped create, realizing that holy shit, they might have made the teensiest boo-boo?

Can we point out something super fast, for Cillizza and the rest of the inbred Beltway media? ALL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS OUT THERE BITCHING AND MOANING ABOUT DEMOCRATS' ALLEGED "INCIVILITY" ARE DOING MORE TO NORMALIZE DONALD FUCKING TRUMP THAN ANY ASS-LICKING REPUBLICAN IN THE HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS IS DOING TO NORMALIZE DONALD GODDAMN FUCKING TRUMP.

The shit we are being forced to endure from the Pundits That Be right now is beyond ridiculous, just like it was beyond ridiculous when we were expected to hit the fainting couch over Michelle Wolf calling Sarah Huckabee Sanders a smoky-eyed liar at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Now, we are being told that BOTH SIDES DO IT, but mostly Maxine Waters does it, because she loudly encouraged civil disobedience in the face of an authoritarian president.

Cillizza and half the milquetoast contributors on MSNBC and CNN can go fuck themselves with their jeremiads about how we're "sinking down to Trump's level" or "What happened to Michelle Obama saying when they go low, we go high?" First of all, we couldn't possibly sink down to that shit-mouth's level, because we're smarter than he is and we don't use unnecessary quotation marks or capital letters. Also, we can spell. And we're not fucking bigoted pig trash with orange skin and incorrect hair. Second of all, as Michelle Goldberg notes in her excellent piece on the subject (that she just happened to publish before we had a chance to sit down and write this), we are having a CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY. This is not a moment for high-minded appeals to our common humanity, because we have been invaded from within by a regime that seeks to destroy every single one of our institutions and turn America into a feverish wet dream of xenophobia, white supremacy and, yes, fascism. (Yes, dears, it's OK to call a thing by its name.)

So please spare us the hot takes about how Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kirstjen Nielsen and Stephen Miller are just normal people who disagree with us, who deserve the dignity of eating a meal in in a public place without fear of having somebody yell at them and call them names. As Goldberg notes:

[T]here's a moral and psychic cost to participating in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public servants. I don't blame staff members at the Virginia restaurant, the Red Hen, for not wanting to help Sanders unwind after a hard week of lying to the public about mass child abuse.

For fuckin' real.

And if Chris Cillizza or Chuck Todd or Maggie Haberman or any other shitty-ass journalist needs a visual aid to explain that no, both sides don't do it, and yes, these times call for more than just their pissant "civility," David Neiwert, an actual investigative journalist who specializes in right-wing extremism, has made you this nice 15-minute video about right-wing "civility." Put it in your pipe and fucking smoke it while we're over here encouraging every service industry worker who encounters a Trump fascist to cancel their orders, kick them out, and fucking send them to bed hungry:

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[ CNN / New York Times ]