Sunday Morning Comin' Down: Dean of the Dead

Six years ago on David Gregory's Meet the Press shit-show, Tom Brokaw literally could not wait two, complete sentences before leaping to invoke the Great and Powerful "Both Sides Do It" lie:

TOM BROKAW:  Well, I really think that, behind the headlines-- this is the Washington Post this morning, and it says that, "Obama seems 2014 as key to his legacy." What we have going on here, 18 months out, are both sides positioning themselves for trying to retain control on the Republican side of the House, and maybe even win the Senate; the president trying to build a legacy of some kind. There's a whole lot of politics in this, as there is in everything else. Kind of two villages, clashing with each other, who seem to occupy a separate universe.

Six years later, on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press shit-show, we find...

TOM BROKAW:  I really didn't think that you could widen the gap between the Beltway and the rest of the country any more, until this happened. And now, it's completely gone. I mean, you know, I told you earlier that I talked to these westerners who began by saying, "Like Trump, like his policies." Then, they said, "Wish he’d stop, wish he would stop tweeting all the time." Last time I talked to them, "He's a clown. I can't stand him. But it's still the policies that we believe in." But anywhere I go, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, "Why can't they talk to each other and find common ground?" Every community in America finds a way to build a new school or to do something about downtown. But here, we can't do it, because we breathe the same air. And it's toxic, in its own way, about what needs to be done and how seriously people take their very minute positions on something...

And then, holy moly, this...

TOM BROKAW:  And a lot of this, we don't want to talk about. But the fact is, on the Republican side, a lot of people see the rise of an extraordinary, important, new constituent in American politics, Hispanics, who will come here and all be Democrats. Also, I hear, when I push people a little harder, "Well, I don't know whether I want brown grandbabies." I mean, that's also a part of it. It's the intermarriage that is going on and the cultures that are conflicting with each other. I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That's one of the things I've been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities. And that's going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.

This was shortly after House Minority Meatpuppet Kevin McCarthy had done his bit to improve the discourse by staring out at the world with his dead, doll's eyes and lying through his teeth over and over again while Chuck Todd sat there like a month-past-Halloween jack-o-lantern grinning and letting him get away with it.  Here's a sample:

REP. KEVIN McCARTHY: ... The president is the only one who has been reasonable in these negotiations. And Chuck, I've been in every single meeting, so I watched it. 

And of course what would the Meet the Press shit-show be without the Hugh Hewitt (the Cyborg Sent From The Future To Destroy America) occasionally leaving his recharging bay and taking a seat at the table to ramble on about how Donald Trump will bring America together by overthrowing Maduro in Venezuela while Chuck Todd keeps himself awake by trying to calculate exactly how much his Comcast 401K was worth at that exact moment.
                 
As far as I can tell, the only reason NBC trundles Brokaw's mortal remains out every few months is so that a number of senior citizens with disposable incomes can peering owlishly at the RCA in the day-room can tell everyone to hush up because John Chancellor's on!  Beyond that, it now seems like an act of cruelty to keeps trotting this befuddled old crank out long, long past his "put out to pasture" date has past.

But it does bring up an important point.

Ahem.

Having crunched the numbers, I have found that fundraising a couple of dollar at a time is inefficient and time-consuming.   Therefor I am announcing the formation of a Blog Exploratory Committee to explore the feasibility of rebranding the "driftglass" blog from a scrappy, poor-but-honest Liberal blog that is usually right about most things embarrassingly ahead of the curve and is therefor roundly ignored and/or despised by the Right, the Beltway Center and quite a few of my "allies"...

...into an insanely lucrative Centrist Independent vanity blog.

Some of you may recall my initial 2010 foray into the insanely lucrative Centrist Independent vanity blogging world --

--  where we discovered together just how staggeringly easy...

Partisanship Decried.



Some wonder if anything can be done?

...writing as a Both Siderist hack really is.

A Reader Writes:

"While usually supportive of much of the content produced at this site, I believe your recent treatment of a highly-publicized, controversial issue left a great deal to be desired and did not fairly represent other views and/or fully include facts from other sources which may have somewhat mitigated the opinion you expressed.
..."

But another reader writes:

"...
While I often disagree with the content produced at this site, I found myself in agreement with you about your recent treatment of a highly-publicized, controversial issue. Despite my past misgivings I found this change refreshing and positive."

See?

It is literally the laziest, stupidest writing there is, and as I said, insanely lucrative.  And mind you, I am speaking as someone who has been writing pretty good, original essays (often accompanied by pretty good original graphic art) about the racism and madness of the Right, the corruption and cravenness of the  Both Siderist media and how the toxic, codependent interaction between of these two forces would eventually kill this country, pretty much every day for the past 14 years.  Since before Donald Trump was a blip on anyone's radar.  Long before Barack Obama was elected.  Before Nancy Pelosi was speaker the last time.

And now that the day of reckoning has come, and the Both Siderists (as Brother Charlie Pierce notes) are in a state of complete freak-out --

The idea that the times now cry out for deficit-hawkery married to MBA-worship is not a little horrifying. But it's a quite predictable reaction to the current political moment. As you can see by the hysterical reaction to Senator Professor Warren's proposed wealth-tax, and to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposal to bring back the Bolshevism of John F. Kennedy's tax plans, the masters of the universe are running scared for the first time in a long while. This is a good thing. God knows they need the exercise.

-- if billionaire Both Siderist Howard Schultz is prepared to spend more over a weekend than my blog will make in the next 20 years on a doomed Centrist Independent vanity candidacy

Howard Schultz might commit an historic blunder and get Trump reelected because he doesn't understand politics at all https://t.co/qu4woQTt1z

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) January 28, 2019

-- that includes hiring good, ol' Of Course We Can Trust Him 'Cause He's A Never Trumper Steve Schmidt to tell him what he wants to hear, I see no compelling reason not to take a little vacation from shouting into the abyss and instead spending the next year or so sopping my share of the flop-sweat panic money that rich idiots who have spent the last 20 years on David Brooks bender will be throwing around.

After all, if my master plan goes sideways, I can always borrow a page from the Never Trumper playbook.  You know, write a book explaining that I never knew that the Centrist Independent movement was a scam run by amoral monsters who would inevitably wreck the country.  Because they weren't True Centrist Independents anyway.

Then have my Stalwart Liberal Allies blurb it.

Then have my Soon To Be Very Good Friends in the Beltway Media pimp it.

And then (fingers crossed!) pick up a regular guest spot on MSNBC or Fox or CNN (why not all three!) denouncing the bad faith of the Fake Both Siderist Movement and promoting my Glorious New True Both Siderist Movement which (fingers  re-crossed!) will also be generously underwritten by a credulous billionaire.

But until then, I remain your humble servant :-)

Behold, a Tip Jar!