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Yes, CNN has, after a half month of dithering, now parted ways with Santorum. Here is how I imagine the internal CNN conversation went:
Executive 1: So, Rick Santorum opened his mouth again and we’re getting serious pressure to toss him.
Executive 2: Rick Santorum? I have no idea who that is.
Executive 1: Remember back in 2016 when none of our conservative pundits would defend Donald Trump’s presidential bid because the guy was so obviously a brick-stupid racist con artist that even the guys that defended prisoner torture didn’t want anything to do with him, so we had to hire a bunch of new dishonest hacks who would? Rick was one of those guys.
Executive 2: We hired like twenty of those. Are we talking about the obvious cocaine user, the conspiracy nut, the conspiracy nut with different hair, or the conspiracy nut who thinks Ukraine has been breaking into his house and hiding his socks?
Executive 1: The one that looks like a serial killer with a secret mason jar fetish.
Executive 2: Well, that’s half of them.
Executive 1: [shows picture]
Executive 2: …
[Two weeks go past as the hamster wheel in Executive 2‘s head slowly turns, making metallic screeching noises only he can hear.]
Executive 2: WE’RE STILL PAYING THAT GUY? JESUS, I THOUGHT HE’D GONE OFF TO BUILD A NEW JOSH DUGGAR THEME PARK. Sweet crap, yeah, cut him off.
And scene. As we all talked about two weeks ago, Rick Santorum is such an obviously insincere person, a great void of blandness clearly scraping for relevance with his willingness to redefine conservatism down into lower and lower stratas of incompetence and malevolence, a man whose juggling-balls-on-a-unicycle network performativeness is so obviously a bid for public attention that even his scandals feel like copied homework.
Fine, good, so now he maybe will be appearing on CNN slightly less often. CNN will probably make up for this by signing the now completely off-the-rails Michael Flynn to host his own show, so it’s difficult to even consider it as a win. And Rick will probably reemerge in two months with a new one-man puppet show devoted to praising Ron DeSantis as our new Dear Leader, and unless the puppets are on fire, his hands are on fire, and the stage is on fire nobody will care.
God, this man is so boring. Even when explaining why the descent of Republicanism into lying fascist incoherence is the fault of liberal decadence or whatever, he’s boring. Even mentioning his name is torture. I don’t want to write about politics and Rick Santorum, I want to write a nice, banal story with elves and dwarves and dragons. Do people still read those anymore? I love stories like that. Except we’re almost always expected to side with the elves, who are Pretty and Lily White and have pointed ears and look like they all stepped out of a detergent commercial rather than with the dwarves, who like technology and beating the crap out of things and, above all, living in a dark hole with as little contact with the world’s weird sunlight-tolerant extroverts as possible. How is this even a fair comparison? In my story the dwarves would be the heroes, because the impossibly attractive elves and the absurdly overskilled humans would be all Let’s go have an adventure! and the dwarves would be Screw you, this is a perfectly good hole and we’ve got Xbox. That’s the story I want to write.
Wait, I got sidetracked again. Damn it.
Yeah, anyway, it turns out that CNN did end up dumping Rick Santorum, after spending what feels like an amazing amount of time pretending to not know they were still paying him to begin with. We won’t know if it’s an improvement until we see what depraved liar gets Rick’s airtime instead. Heaven knows CNN has shown no interest in reflecting on the extensive damage their strategic elevation of Republicanism’s most dishonest, ever-bullshitting propagandists did to the nation they were supposedly covering as “news” operation; given that, there’s little evidence that they don’t intend to continue.
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