...a cry is heard.
From The Hartford Courant:
Bob Stefanowski Concedes Governor's Race After Cities Push Ned Lamont To Victory
And with that, the dream has well and truly died.
From David Fucking Brooks 12 years ago (with emphasis added):...
Party No. 3
There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain/Lieberman Party. All were on display Tuesday night.
...
The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.
The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.
But the experience of [Tom] DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.
The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom.
On policy grounds, too, the McCain-Lieberman Party is distinct...
The McCain-Lieberman Party sees Democrats in the grip of teachers’ unions and Republicans who let corporations write environmental rules.
It sees two parties that depend on the culture war for internal cohesion and that make abortion a litmus test.
It sees two traditions immobilized to trench warfare.
The McCain-Lieberman Party is emerging because the war with Islamic extremism, which opened new fissures and exacerbated old ones, will dominate the next five years as much as it has dominated the last five. It is emerging because of deep trends that are polarizing our politics. It is emerging because social conservatives continue to pull the GOP rightward (look at how Representative Joe Schwarz, a moderate Republican, was defeated by a conservative rival in Michigan). It is emerging because highly educated secular liberals are pulling the Democrats upscale and to the left. (Lamont’s voters are rich, and 65 percent call themselves liberals, compared with 30 percent of Democrats nationwide.)
The history of third parties is that they get absorbed into one of the existing two, and that will probably happen here. John McCain and Hillary Clinton will try to reconcile their centrist approaches with the hostile forces in their own parties. And maybe they will succeed (McCain has a better chance, since the ideologues on the right feel vulnerable while the ideologues on the left, perpetually two years behind the national mood, think the public wants more rage)...
This has been your timely reminder that Mr. David Brooks as never been right about anything
That his The New York Times has never amounted to anything but this same Both Siderist schlock mindlessly repeated over and over and over again, year after year.
And that the House of Sulzberger and the rest of the Beltway media loves him him for it and lavishly rewards him for it.
Behold, A Tip Jar
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