Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Today In Both Sides Do It: The Parasite-Cult



If I believed in silver bullets, the silver bullet that would finally take down the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It would look a lot like this:

But I do not believe in silver bullets.  Because, along with you I have watched the media Big Lie of Both Sides Do It shredded over and over again by a belt-fed, 1,200-rounds-per-minute hail of such silver bullets for the last 20 years.  More than enough by an overkill factor of a million by any objective standard to put paid to that filthy little lie once and for all.

And along with you, I have watched the media Big Lie of Both Siderism rise from the dead every time.  Shrug off wars and lost cities and economic collapses.  Shrug off ginned up political witch-hunts, and torture and Fox News.  Shrug off birtherism, death panels and the nuclear option.  Shrug it all off and accept a Pulitzer Prize for Advanced Shruggery.

Because the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It it isn't merely  a filthy little lie.  It is a massive, sprawling, multi-tentacled, inconceivably lucrative lie.  A planet-smothering, corporate vision statement of a lie.

This is why the Big Lie of Both Siderism cannot be defeated by shaming even it's most ludicrous Conservative practitioners (from CNN, with emphasis added):

Adam Schiff should recuse himself too

By Mike Rogers
Updated 7:45 AM ET, Mon April 10, 2017

Editor's Note: Mike Rogers is a CNN national security commentator, the host of CNN's "Declassified" TV series and the past chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The views expressed are his own.

Representative Devin Nunes' decision to recuse himself from the probe of Russian operations should be applauded. It won't be in today's environment and in the court of public opinion, but it should be applauded nonetheless. The attention was on him, his role and his actions, and not that of the committee or the issues it handles.

Equally, Representative Adam Schiff should consider recusing himself from the probe. For his part, Schiff suggested to the media that he had seen information on Russia-Trump campaign ties that was "the kind of evidence" that would be presented to a grand jury, adding that he had seen additional evidence, but not elaborating further.

Both Nunes and Schiff are equally to blame for the Committee's loss of focus...

Because it the only political bludgeon the Party of Trump has left, and members of the Party of Trump are no longer biologically capable of feeling shame.

Nor can the Big Lie of Both Siderism be defeated with mere facts and logic because for hundreds of America's most overpaid Beltway media urinal cakes, it is literally all they know how to do (from The New Republic):

#Bothsides is the most failed, destructive, opportunistic, and falsifiable analytical conceit in American politics.

...
You can draw any number of inferences from this observation, but the most inarguable, in my opinion, is how devastating it is to the conceit that U.S. political dysfunction—embodied most recently in the GOP theft of a Supreme Court seat—should be attributed to both parties in equal measure. Reflexive even-handedness the analytical foundation of countless news stories, and nearly all punditry, but it wasn’t derived from dispassionate observation of political reality.

Rather, it was contrived to burnish the mainstream media claim to political neutrality, and the neutrality of parent companies. But its effect was to leave implacable conservative critics of mainstream culture totally dissatisfied, and has failed every other consumer in the market for accurate, unskewed news and on-the-level commentary. It should have been put to rest long ago, and can’t die soon enough.
I have been writing exhaustively (and to the point of exhaustion) about this particular subject since my first week blogging 12 years ago, and believe me I was thinking about it and bitching about it long before that.  And for all of that time -- through three presidential administrations -- two facts have been perfectly clear.

First, the lazy and cowardly legions of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It are the Right's truest ally and the Left's most treacherous opponent.  As I wrote just last week, Both Siderism is a...
...parasite-cult that empowers the Right by deflecting and diffusing its opponents. and without which the demise of the Right would be greatly accelerated.
And second, because it is a parasite-cult, as the chasm it tries to straddle between the relatively venial sins of the Left and the outright, raving racism and lunacy of the Right becomes exponentially wider, the more brittle and indefensibly ridiculous Both Siderism becomes.

Both Siderism is to politics in 2017 what the Siegfried Line was to warfare in 1944: an empty shell, overgrown and crawling with cows.

Give us the right tools, and we on the Left could punch through it in two days.




4 comments:

Jimbo said...

I think we need to step back and go to the next level of background to get the right perspective on bothsiderism. First, all "modern" economies (since at least the early 19th century)have been mixed economies, i.e. government serves to set the playing field and, to a widely varying extent over time and country, also the referee function. America was founded on genocide (native Americans), slavery and religious intolerance (all those fundamentalists, past and present) that seek to impress a horrible "Christian" theocracy on the country. So, the U.S. is a country that is almost uniquely set up for a highly exploitative and vicious culture of capitalism associated with a my way or the highway type of individualism. The US history of labor oppression is a case study of this.

This combination resulted in repeated drastic economic crises (called Panics) and a terrible civil war throughout the 19th century, despite a lot of New England idealism and great but ineffectual thinkers. By the early 20th century, the depredations of rampant capitalism demanded reforms just to make the country continue to function (TR, Wilson and FDR for short) so that by the 1950s, transparently rapist capitalism had been tamed by government. But the long-run themes of American history: genocide, slavery and theocracy never went away, especially in the South and West and eventually they came back, unsuccessfully with Goldwater, more successfully with Nixon (but without unbridled capitalism) and most successfully with Reagan when exploitative multinational capitalism cynically welded itself with theocracy and racist economic exploitation.

So that's where we are today except Reaganism , which was mostly a show went totally radical ideologue on the right under Gingrich and successors and the entire political discussion has been radically shifted to the dysfunctional right. The ability of the Deep Capitalist State to buy all sorts of media is a major factor in bothsiderism but America's historical legacy of genocide, slavery and theocracy makes the rightist project so easy and that's why bothsiderism succeeds. Until it doesn't. Once the system starts to collapse, the Capitalist Deep State may back off. We'll see.

Pablo in the Gazebo said...

I don't know who Andrew Kaczynski is, maybe I should, he seems like a nice Polish fellow, the kind grew up with and learned to respect. I'm old enough now to know better, but the generation before me enjoyed ethnic identities in a way that is lost now, without rancor, always with respect.
So here we have Andrew's tweet, terse, no bullshit, just some facts, presented without comment - here, look at this - take two seconds to read it twice.
It sums up the hate that is in power now.
Just fucking hate.

Anonymous said...

"I know I'm a Prima Dona" says Scott, as Patton. Well, I was going with-"Just another American Asshole", but I'll take prima dona, for the win, Alex!

If I recall, which I'm pretty sure I do, after a lifetime of listening to my Grandaddy talk about- "The Route To Caen", he in his volunteer position of tank-driving the "Bathless Groggins", we Canadians were ORDERED to hold up, just outside of Victory, so the Yankees could seize their glory.

You see how hollow and false that is, right? Fool's gold. Enjoying it? 'cause now you've trumped yourselves- and you're taking the rest of us 8 billion down with you. Thanks for coming out, hillbillies.

Now, Thomas Friedman & his Mustache of Understanding, tried to enlighten me last evening. Nothing. Just nothing. And I've give him, and many others, a multitude of years to do it and I'm- done. Done and done.

Remember this: the Truth is simple. Will always out.
And the Truth shall set us free. Strong & Free!

B D S

Salute-
LaLi.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and Mike Rodgers is a fuckwit- you can always tell a conning Conservative- yes, you're right- there is no other kind- they all wear the veil and think we can't see how their eyes change when their mouths open and the lying begins; the micro-expressions they cannot hide- for love nor money.

Thank God for micro-expressions and body-language. They're 'tells'...

Have a good one, Your Driftness.

B D S
LaLi.

P.S.
..."and what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but loses his soul?"