Friday, May 12, 2017

Today In Both Sides Do It: The New York Times



See if you can find the key razor-in-the-apple word in this passage from a river of Both Siderist bullshit that rolled like the mighty Mississippi right through the Gray Lady yesterday:
For Trump Supporters, the Real Outrage Is the Left’s Uproar Over Comey

...
When Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, was asked on Fox News about comparisons that liberals and others have made between the firing of Mr. Comey and the “Saturday Night Massacre” — the ouster of Justice Department officials who refused to carry out President Richard M. Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor leading the Watergate investigation — he snapped, “Suck it up and move on.”

Democrats should recognize that reaction. For years, they accused Republicans of resisting Mr. Obama’s agenda at every turn, of being spiteful and even hateful as they refused to accept the results of the presidential election. And now, Republicans seem to relish the opportunity to turn the tables.

Rush Limbaugh told his listeners on Wednesday, “This kind of irrational hate — this all-consuming hate and derangement, delusion — it isn’t healthy.”
If you said "accused", give yourself a gold star.

Or crack a beer.

Of course the entire, depraved and very public record of premeditated Republican sabotage, slander and sedition for eight straight years under President Obama must now be whitewashed and compacted to a mere partisan accusation leveled by Democrats so it can be slotted into the one millionth steaming Both Siderist turd pooped out by the Serious Media to reassure their Beltway friends and shareholders.

Because at this point Both Siderism is an overflowing media garbage scow full of plague rats that must be tamped down every single fucking day.  And if the media ever stops incessantly lying about Democrats and Republicans being pretty much exactly the same -- even for a minute --


-- those plague rats will start running loose up and down the Acela corridor.


Update:  Krugman Concurs (with emphasis added and a h/t to Alert Reader "il"):
...
At this point, in other words, almost an entire party appears to have decided that potential treason in the cause of tax cuts for the wealthy is no vice. And that’s barely hyperbole.

How did a whole party become so, well, un-American? For this story now goes far beyond Trump.
...

But the more proximate issue is the transformation of the Republican Party, which bears little if any resemblance to the institution it used to be, say during the Watergate hearings of the 1970s. Back then, Republican members of Congress were citizens first, partisans second. But today’s G.O.P. is more like a radical, anti-democratic insurgency than a conventional political party.

The political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been trying to explain this transformation for years, fighting an uphill battle against the false equivalence that still dominates punditry. As they note, the G.O.P. hasn’t just become “ideologically extreme”; it is “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

So it’s naïve to expect Republicans to join forces with Democrats to get to the bottom of the Russia scandal — even if that scandal may strike at the very roots of our national security. Today’s Republicans just don’t cooperate with Democrats, period. They’d rather work with Vladimir Putin...

4 comments:

Ten Bears said...

Fascism sneaks in the back door.

That is the German experience, slowly, over time, it just sort of happened. Milton Mayer writes in his book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 not overnight: incrementally, like the legendary slow boiling of frogs.

Fascism creeps:

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

… “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

Fascism creeps. Sneaks in the backdoor.

trgahan said...

"All the News That's Fit To Print" uses a daily Boss Limbaugh nugget straight from his ass into the waiting mouths of his Dittohead "economically anxious working class" audience in an article yelling at Democrats for being too mean again to Republicans for their, once again, obvious abandonment for governmental process that they held as sacred from 2009 to 6 months ago.

Our news "elite" want us to know Republican lockstep support of the rise of white nationalist fascist oligarchy is all liberals fault for being too mean.

Habitat Vic said...

Thomas,

Though I haven't read that book (yet), your quotes are heart-breakingly apropos of the current political climate in the USA.

My father grew up in a notably non-communist extended family in the Soviet Bloc of the 20's & 30's. His dad (my grandfather) and older brother (my uncle) were taken away & killed one Christmas by their previously-friendly, recently turned Communist neighbors. Caused my father to join the Nazis (claimed to be 1/8th Prussian, though we are really Polish - Germans took him anyway). Eventually fought against both Germans & Soviets, spending 1944 in a Nazi work camp.

Though he rarely spoke of the brutality he saw from both the Stalinists & Nazis, between him and my relatives I heard enough to be frightened of what people could become. For many years, despite my father's railing against the ever worsening Republican party, I dismissed it by thinking that such political upheavals - with neighbor turned against neighbor, literally killing each other - could not happen here. I told my dad that he was wrong. That we did not have the war damaged, starving people - ripe for indoctrination and easy answers by communists or fascists - that it would take to destroy/transform our society.

I thought it couldn't happen here in the US. But I was wrong. It can. I have stood over my father's grave and apologized. There's a rough road ahead for this country, and I'm sorry to say that its earned that journey.

Unknown said...

I have come to realize the only way to possibly thwart Trump and Republicans is to promote democracy in Russia.