Before we get to today's Both Siderist razor in the apple, a brief reminder who Kathleen Parker is.
Because she is eminently forgettable.
Ms. Parker is an inconsequential Conservative pundit who has made a 34-year long career out of drafting along behind conventional Conservative Beltway wisdom and piping up to say "Me too!" on two and four. Her only real breakout moment was in 2008 when she suddenly noticed that, OMG!, her Republican party was full of Republicans!
This is from my own archives since the sands of time have swallowed the FireDogLake blog where this was originally posted:
Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts
By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008
Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:
...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.
Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:
...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.I'm truly speechless...
Not to worry though: as history teaches us over and over again, while such epiphanies do occasionally occur among the hacks of the Beltway, they are almost always fleeting. Once the initial sting passes, they quickly return their true calling. In Ms. Parker's case that meant almost immediately resuming her role as a shallow Conservative beanfield hand. For example, here she is in 2010 on the long-since defunct Chris Matthews Show, troweling out Beltway Convention Wisdom shoulder-to-shoulder with David Fucking Brooks. (h/t Crooks & Liars for their indispensable archives):
Chris Matthews: Do you think Clarence now that the administration, these smart guys around the President, he especially, misread his mandate and said they didn’t like Bush, they didn’t like Cheney, so they’re going to like a real liberal, even leftist kind of government? Did they misread it?
Kathleen Parker: Well first of all, Barack Obama had one mandate, and that was to not be George W. Bush and he should have known from the Clintons that any time you tack left, you go in the hole. You know he was elected by all of these former Republicans and independents because they thought he was going to be a centrist leader and he projected that on the campaign. So you know, he’s got to come back center.
Alert readers will not fail to notice how little things have changed since 2010. Then as now Green Room Conservatives insist that any Democrat who manages to make it into the White House owe everything to the "former Republicans and independents" and therefor have no fucking business trying to govern as a Democrat.
And so, given all the calamity and tragedy and treason and farce that Ms. Parker's Republican party has visited on on this country since her heady days agreeing with David Brooks that Obama was a Socialist in Whig clothing and doomed to fail, where does Ms. Parker find herself?
Exactly where she has always been.
From Ms. Parker last Friday:
It’s fair to say that, with each president following George H.W. Bush, division became an end in itself, a self-righteous vision that culminated in the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol. While the fringes terrorize the center with fear tactics and racial division, is it any surprise that we’re divided about whether to accept a lifesaving vaccine?
In the safest bunker of the laziest pundits.
Drafting along behind conventional Conservative Beltway Both Siderist wisdom and chiming in with a "Me too!" on two and four.
