The Door Is Closed

by digby

Regular readers know that I’m skeptical of all this bipartisan, post-partisan stuff because it only seems to be relevant when liberals might have a shot at power. Feels like Charlie Brown with the football time to me. But be that as it may, I guess I can’t have a fit every time some vapid trendy decides that he or she wants to be on the liberal team now that conservatism has gone out of fashion.

Nevertheless, as God is my witness, if Dennis Miller tries to come back in the fold I will make it my life’s work to destroy him. I’ll show up at this concerts with pictures of dead Iraqi children. I’ll organize boycotts of every comedy club he tries to appear in. I’ll make it my business to ensure that nobody ever forgets what a fucking jackass he has been for the past eight years.

He was on O’Reilly earlier this week, revealing his puerile sexual imagination once again, but also giving a tiny hint that he might just be tacking back to the left in light of the fact that his affiliation with the right is no longer fashionable — even among them:

O’REILLY: Now, the Sarah Palin hysteria. I mean, can you believe she’s getting more ink now than the president-elect is getting? Didn’t she lose? It looks like she won. MILLER: Listen, she’s a great dame. People are fascinated by her because the left hate her. I think the left hate her — mostly women on the left hate her, because to me, from outside in, it appears that she has a great sex life. All right? I think she has non-neurotic sex with that Todd Palin guy. I think most of the women on the Upper East Side, their husbands haven’t been aroused since Mailer signed copy of The Executioner’s Song at Rizzoli’s back in the early ’70s. So they look at her, and they hate her. I think that snowmobile looks like mechanized foreplay to me, and that’s why people are fascinated by it. O’REILLY: So you think that — cutting through all of the metaphors that even I don’t even understand. Rizzoli’s used to be a bookstore. You think that because she looks like a happy, wedded mom with — MILLER: Yeah. O’REILLY: — not so much neurosis, that these people are going, “We have to hate her”? It’s — what, it’s schadenfreude? Is that — how do you say that? German? MILLER: It’s called schadenfreude. O’REILLY: Schadenfreude. [unintelligible] MILLER: The Germans concocted it. It’s one’s vague pleasure in another’s discomfort. Leave it to the Germans, by the way, to concoct an intricate glossary of pain terminology. But I think people have — I think people have schadenfreude about her. It’s like Tina Fey’s movie Mean Girls. Women are mean to other women. They look at her, she looks happy, a lot of them aren’t, and they’re cranky about her. Plus, you know, she’s still viable to me. Katie Couric is not going to be the interlocutor that turns me off Sarah Palin. For God’s sakes, does anybody remember Katie Couric during her first month on the job? Bill Paley and Ed Murrow were turning over in their graves so fast that they resembled the twin screws on the Thunderball boat, the Disco Volante, when they threw it into hydrofoil mode. O’REILLY: I guess that’s a James Bond reference there? MILLER: I don’t even — Billy, I have no idea. Help me. Help me, for God’s sake. O’REILLY: Miller, I hate to say this, but I think you may be beyond help. I think Bordello of Blood was it. Now, you’ve been reassessing in the last — in the last eight days the presidential vote. And what conclusions, Miller, have you come to? MILLER: Well, two. I’m kind of happy now that it’s over. Because when they showed Grant Park that night and I saw the looks on the face of some of the black elders looking up, who had been pushed aside to lunch counters and bathrooms, and I saw that catharsis, I thought, well, I intellectualized this would be good for the country in that way. I had no idea the depth of feeling. It pleases my heart. I’m happy for them. Also, the guy looks so smart to me. I didn’t believe anything he said when he was running. But now I know he’s so smart that when two dim, mindless magpies like [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid [D-NV] and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi [D-CA] trundle down there to sell their tired Willy Loman wares, he’s going to pay them lip service. The moment they split, he’s going to look at [incoming White House chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel and go, “Sharp elbows, dull intellects. We’re not listening to those cats. Do you think I worked this hard to get to this point that I’m going to parrot what those two idiots say?” So I like the fact that he’s really smart. And you know something? He’s my president now. And I am not going to do what the left did to Bush. I find it unbecoming. I hope that Barack Obama does so well that four years hence, I am salivating to vote for him. I want this all to work, because I love my country. At some point, I make Lee Greenwood look like the Rosenbergs. And I hope he does great. But I will not turn my back on George Bush. Today, 2,619 days since a domestic terror attack on this soil. Thank you to my commander in chief, and thank you to the troops for providing us the safety to have an election like that. O’REILLY: Absolutely. Now, how skeptical are you going to — I think your sentiment is noble, by the way. And particularly in this dangerous economic time when people are really suffering, you’ve got to root for Obama to get the economy back on track and lessen suffering. But how skeptical are you going to be? And how — and what is my watchdog role? See, I’m setting myself up to watch Barack Obama. You know, and I’m going to be fair about it. There’s no doubt I’ll be fair. But I’m going to very — you know, watch him closer than I watched Bush because I didn’t watch Bush close enough. I didn’t. I admit it. I should have. So, how skeptical are you going to be about Obama? Are you going to bring a skepticism in from the beginning? MILLER: I’m always skeptical about guys who want to be president, because it seems like its own form of madness to me. But I’ll tell you, if he wants to earn my goodwill and the goodwill of a lot of people, he ought to flatten these punks at AIG who keep taking — these guys party. They make Caligula look like a shut-in. Enough is enough. We just gave them $150 billion. We’ve got to follow them around with hidden cameras. Take it all back, let them go away. It’s economic Darwinism. If they want to spend like that, they should go under. Forget the parties, you guys. And I think that he ought to come down hard on them right now. O’REILLY: OK, and then arrest Barney Frank, correct? MILLER: Barney might want to be arrested.

No how, no way, no Miller. You will never EVER be accepted on the left again no matter how much you want to. You don’t get to talk about how smart Obama is after worshipping that ignorant brand name in a suit for the last 8 years.

That exchange is the face of what’s left of the right. Bill O’Reilly the psycho and Dennis Miller, the opportunist who chose the wrong side. The big tent isn’t big enough for either one of them.

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