The Dead Hand of David Broder

So David Gergen was surprised that Mitt Romney just "flat-out lied" and that Barack Obama was so unprepared to cope with it.

Well isn't that just flat-out hilarious!  

Because what I witnessed last night was David Gergen's fondest, wettest dream leap from the most insipid paragraphs of the worst David Brooks columns ever written and come magically to life: the most perfect Villager debate imaginable, constructed entirely to Beltway Mouse Circus specifications, with every bathroom and breakfast nook and all the vast spaces for entertaining impeccably furnished in very finest High Broderism (from the Urban Dictionary):

Broderism

The worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses" attitude. The main goal is the establishment of a permanent ruling class of Washington insiders, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as "centrism" even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. The establishment of an aristocratic class in America.

The belief that it all sides are equal and must compromise at all times. Regardless of the final outcome or the level of understanding or intelligence presented by each side.

A Republican left to lie as freely and easily as he wishes?

Check.  

A center/right Democrat hobbling himself by mashing his responses to one big, wild Republican lie after another into a verbal Procrustean bed of  "Um...y'know...uh...Mitt...I'm not sure... that's... uh... entirely... y'know... factually accurate..." ?

Check.

And then, rolled out like a stripper cake at a bachelor party, the biggest lie of the night.  The big lie that makes all the little lies possible. That old, reliable Big Lie of Centrism, paraded across the stage accompanied by all the requisite wailing and teeth-gnashing for the lost art of bipartisanship and aisle-crossing.

Check and mate.   

Check and mate because the President of the United States didn't have the balls to break David Brooks' heart once and for all by pointing out that it was all bullshit; that the reason the Good Ship Bipartisan lies in ruins is because a long, long time ago the Republican Party seized the wheel and deliberately ran it up on the rocks.  

Then then burned the wreck down to its nails and brass fittings.  

Then they salted the Earth for a 1,000 miles in every direction.

But saying that is rude so no one said it, which is how we left things last night. And which is why I was completely unsurprised to flip on my Liberal media this morning just long enough to see Chuck Todd, Tom Brokaw and a bunch of undecided Colorado voters dancing naked around a bonfire chanting "Both Sides do it! Both Sides do it! Both Sides do it! " :

"I did not get the sense that either one of them addressed the [crossing party lines] issue."

Kids, the reason Jim Lehrer didn't need to lift a finger to enforce any sort of rules was that,  absent an act of brutally frank and sustained will, the internalized norms of High Broderism are 100% self-enforcing.

So to those who wonders why I spend so much time and energy on this tiny blog of mine and on "The Professional Left" podcast focusing on the Big Lie of Centrism -- the lie that has gelded our professional media and all but killed our ability to conduct honest, public political discourse in the country -- that fiasco last night is your answer.