If Fox Noise has turned against "Slimy Dick" Morris, it must mean he's crossed some kind of line, right?

No, of course I didn't watch the clip of "Slimy Dick." What're you, nuts? But you can watch it if you like. You'll find it in actual clip form here.

by Ken

Oh please, let me not blow the punchline on this one.

It always fascinates me when the Far Right turns on one of its own. Why? Because it means, presumably, that this one of its own has Gone Too Far, which fascinates me on the simplest level as a demonstration that even among the most deluded and deluding, there actually is such a thing as "too far."

Howie and I have both been all over "Cockroach Eric" Cantor's bizarre "rebranding" campaign, in which the brutish dunce is apparently trying his best to show us a kinder, gentler Eric. (My contribution yesterday was the post "Now we know who should have played the title role in The Eric Cantor Story." I won't say anything more except to note that the post was accompanied by a blurry clip of Judy Garland singing, "Get Happy.") I say "apparently" because the Cockroach's "best" isn't good for anything except blunt frontal assaults on people whose toes he isn't fit to lick. But you'd have to guess that this is what he thing he's doing, and doing such a dreadful job of it. Let's recall Dana Milbank's WaPo characterization of his performance at his new coming out, delivering his Tuesday speech to the pack at the American Enterprise Institute:

His delivery was forced and, as he read his text, he seemed to be reminding himself to grin. As a result, he scowled for much of the speech and sounded as though he were spitting out his words. Smiles formed at inopportune times, such as when he described a boy’s failure in public school.

No, Cockroach, you can smile about the public school kid's failure when you're securely alone among your psychotic soulmates, but in public . . . er, not so much.

But do you see what's happening? The Cockroach has turned on himself! In some cobwebby corner of its brain, it has apparently admitted the idea that somewhere, somehow he and his crackpot cronies have just possibly gone too far, some way or other.

Which brings us to our Right-Wing Crazy of the Day Who Has Gone Too Far. Ladies and germs, I give you the infinitly odious Dick Morris. (Take him, please.) In case you hadn't heard, Slimy Dick has been given by the heave-ho, which instantly creates the presumption that he has -- you guessed it! -- gone too far.

And Washington Post media mauler Erik Wemple is on the case. Yesterday he reported ("Fox News drops Dick Morris: Hooray"):

No more Fox News contributor Dick Morris. His contract to spout republic-damaging nonsense on Fox airwaves has expired, and the network isn’t renewing it.

Taken together with the news that Sarah Palin will no longer be contributing, the Morris development is strong evidence that Fox News has glimpsed the underside of allowing charlatans to brand its coverage. Palin was a roboto-contributor, who responded to everything with a little crack on the lamestream media and a reference President Obama’s socialist heart.

As for Morris’s misdeeds, well, everyone knows what they are. That’s because Fox News presented them so prominently in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. In his prime-time, pre-election appearances, Morris was among the few pundits who wouldn’t hedge his bets; who wouldn’t triangulate his way through the polling numbers; who wouldn’t rummage through scenario after scenario in his analysis.

No, Dick Morris was predicting a Mitt Romney landslide. Fox News fell for it, and surely millions of Americans did as well. After all, in the same breath that he was predicting landslides, he was citing his own expertise:

It’s not a question of being smarter than anybody else. It’s that I’ve done this for a living and there are very few people on television who talk about politics who’ve ever made a living doing it, and most of them are partisan and echoing a point of view, but when you get down to it, a guy like Karl Rove or Pat Caddell or me or even Joe Trippi, we make a living doing this and I’ve made a living doing it for 40 years.

Vast arrogance and loose, poorly substantiated facts: a great combination for a cable-news contributor in these modern times. . . .

But Erik, are "vast arrogance and loose, poorly substantiated facts" really enough to get you booted from Fox Noise? If so, wouldn't the place be, like, a deserted warehouse? This really isn't much help to me in figuring out where the line is that Slimy Dick crossed.

Evidently Erik himself accepts that he didn't have the last word on the story yesterday, since he's returned today to the subject of "Why Fox News booted Dick Morris."

Erik starts by getting a dig in:

Last night wasn’t a good one for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. That's because in the closing moments of his interview on CNN with Piers Morgan, failed pundit Dick Morris was asked whom he'd like to see lead the Republican Party come 2016.

"Scott Walker," came the response from Morris. Surely he'd win in a landslide.

Erik proceeds to tell us again that Slimy Dick "was just abandoned by Fox news because of his faulty 2012 election predictions."

If you hadn’t heard Morris’s well-worn excuses for erring on his Mitt Romney-blowout prediction of last fall—that an unexpected demographic thing happened, that Superstorm Sandy interrupted the campaign, etc.—this Morgan-Morris interview is for you.
Credit Morgan, however, for prying this bit of news out of his interlocutor:

MORGAN: What people are asking is why FOX is not interested now on your views or whether Republicans want you to go?

MORRIS: Hey, I don’t — I don’t know what FOX is interested in or not.

(Crosstalk)

MORGAN: But they must have told you, isn’t it?

MORRIS: Well, I had a wonderful talk with Roger Ailes, who I really respect, a week ago. And he said in this business, you’re up, you’re down, nothing is final or fatal.

MORGAN: But why are you down now as far as –

MORRIS: Because I was wrong, and I was wrong at the top of my lungs. [Emphasis added.]

Right there: Evidence of honest-to-goodness editorial standards at Fox News, something for which the Erik Wemple Blog is always scanning the horizon.

Did you get that? In Slimy Dick's telling, he was shitcanned by the Noisemakers for being "wrong at the top of my lungs." I'm not absolutely sure that this decisively separates him from people who are still on the Fox Noise payroll. But if someone's got some noise-measuring apparatus to apply to the job, maybe we can get an actual decibel measurement of the exact degree of Slimy Dick's top-of-his-lungs wrongness, and we'll be a step closer to pinpointing the line that he crossed, the step he took that was One Step Too Far even for the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

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IF RON PAUL BACKS BOB BARR, NO MATTER WHAT TOE-SUCKER DICK MORRIS SAYS, McCAIN IS THE WALKING DEAD

With GOP toe-sucker Dick Morris publicly urging McCain to shed his far right extremism and move to the center if he's going to have any chance at all to win a few states outside of the Old Confederacy plus Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, a very different kind of reality is closing in on McCain who, says toe-sucker, "has been dealt a terrible hand: a tanking economy, an unpopular war, a Republican incumbent whose approval ratings are at their all-time low and a gloomy national mood, with 82 percent of Americans saying in a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week that the country is on the wrong track." He offers the hapless Republican nominee a roadmap, a roadmap dependent of Jeremiah Wright-- "the honorary chairman of McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts"-- even though every voter in red, red, red Mississippi first congressional district was inundated with Jeremiah Wright and still voted against Bush and the GOP.

The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.

So McCain doesn't have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.

But even as toe sucker/Fox News shill admits that McBush's endless war in Iraq agenda could kill the deal, another dynamic has arisen that negates whatever toe sucking meditations popped into Morris' demented little right-wing brain: Bob Barr.

Micah Sifry, a lot smarter and far more with it than Morris was even when he was relevant, thinks if McCain doesn't watch his right flank, he's a dead duck. He warns that if McCain follows the toe-sucker's strategy Barr will siphon off enough votes to insure a McCain loss, "not because Barr is such a compelling candidate, but because he could become the vehicle for the many disaffected Republicans gathered under Paul's flag."

More than a million votes have been cast for Paul, about 5 percent of the total cast in Republican primaries so far.
Paul's activists are swarming local Republican party committees and conventions, quietly capturing or lining up delegates in states such as Alaska, Missouri, Minnesota, Florida, Texas and Washington.
And on the Web, the Paul movement -- which, astonishingly, generated enough grassroots support to make him the top Republican presidential money-raiser in the fourth quarter of 2007 -- is still going strong. His Web site is getting about 50,000 unique visitors per week, compared to 90,000 for McCain, according to data marketing company Compete.com. (The two Democratic candidates' combined traffic is about six times higher.) On Google, people are searching for the term "Ron Paul" almost as often as "John McCain." And Paul's new book, "The Revolution: A Manifesto," which has been topping Amazon's sales chart for weeks, hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list today.
Clearly, one sizable chunk of the Republican base -- small-government types who also oppose the Iraq war -- hasn't reconciled itself to voting for McCain. In Minneapolis, at the Republican National Convention, Paul may have a couple dozen delegates and enough street presence to spoil McCain's show. These days, all it takes is one person with a Web-enabled mobile phone to put live video on the Internet, and Paul's fans have already shown how good they are at using the Web to spread messages and keep their movement going. So even if the Republicans manage to keep Paul himself off the stage at the convention, his voice will still be heard. If Barr manages to capture the attention of Paul's base, it could spell real danger for McCain.

McCain will be forced to name an extremist wingnut-- either Buy Bull-thumpin' Mike Huckabee or someone genuinely insane like Jim DeMint (R-SC) or Richard Burr (R-NC) of Tom Coburn (R-OK)-- as a running mate. And since many Americans expect to see the first sitting president since the assassinated JFK to die in office if McCain gets elected, the running mate decision will take on unusual significance. What pleases the nutty base is likely to scare mainstream Americans.