By “us” I mean the “us” Meet the Press envisions, not “us” as in the Republic: 

NBC News has been mocked on social media after complaining that the first public impeachment hearings were lacking in “pizzazz,” causing the word to trend on Twitter.

The network tweeted a story overnight complaining that the testimonies of State Department official George Kent and the U.S. Ukraine diplomat Bill Taylor “lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention.”

Its analysis article on the hearings linked in the post also said the depositions were not “dramatic” and described the manner of the witnesses as “reserved.”

A lot of deserved shit was given to this NBC piece, but I think it’s worth examining where it comes from, which is the same place all those pleading “NOW do Trump supporters still support him?” pieces come from, which is the same place Mitch McConnell comes from.

Which is to say, racist-ass crackers who cannot be saved, and I write this as a white lady who lives in a good school district.

One in four Americans have always been terrible morons and are always gonna be terrible morons, and we have GOT to surrender the fantasy that this will one day not be the case. Just stop arguing with them. Jesus Christ, I watch people fight on Facebook with these boobs and I can’t understand it. Stop acting like you’re gonna zing ’em and they’re gonna come around to your point of view and Trump’s poll numbers will tank. The poll-answerers are all six eps deep into a 36-hour Law and Order marathon and not one of them gives a shit about Trump’s crimes.

They’re not gonna care how much “pizzazz” the hearings have. They’re not gonna care if Donald Trump takes the stand and yells that he ordered the code red. They’re gonna be able to spin it as long as they can spin it in their heads so that over the Thanksgiving turkey they can still tell their liberal daughter-in-law that she’s a stupid bitch. That’s all they care about and nothing’s going to change it.

And once upon a time the Royal News We didn’t hang on these people’s every word or even really care that they existed anymore, but now that we’ve added comments to news stories they’re somehow an audience we cannot lose.

So what is there to do, good sirs and madams of the press corps, who consider themselves influential over the tastes and topics of the modern person? Change the fucking subject. Decide you’re gonna do your job as a grownup and let your viewers and readers howl all they want.

You know, the way you do when you run a profile of a well-groomed Nazi or a retrospective of American unity after 9/11. The way you do when one of your columnists calls somebody a bedbug.

If you won’t, well too bad, so sad, I guess we’re gonna have to have the hearings anyway, despite your assessment of the optics of it all. But I’d like us to surrender the fantasy that at some point everyone will turn on Trump and it will become socially acceptable to ask for his resignation. Resistance will never not require courage, guys. Hate to break it to you.

Thirty percent of this godforsaken place would happily see us all burn if it meant they got to say the N-word again and until you reckon with that you’ll keep after this forlorn hope and blame the optics instead of the racists.

A.