Centrism: Like Strontium-90 In The Milk, Ctd

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Many thanks to alert readers for forwarding this to me.

A million posts have been written by a thousand bloggers debunking the Fake Centrist equivalence using every instrument in our orchestra, from methodical deconstruction  to operatic swearing.

None of it works, because aging Villager clowns like Ted Koppel will never put themselves across the table from people who will press the one question for which there is no rebuttal:

And what if you're wrong? 

What if the actual history of the rise of Hate Radio and Fox News and Regnery Press and on and on exactly parallels the craven, capitulating, Broderite fail, fail, fail of your Mainstream Media?

What if the simple, sad truth of the matter is that your "objective" corporate media was simply, hideously unfit to cope with an aggressive, coordinated and sustained siege from a mob of well-funded demagogues and liars (Hunter Thompson from The Atlantic, 1997):

MH: How will history remember Bill Clinton?

HST: I don't know about history. I don't get any satisfaction out of the old traditional journalist's view -- "I just covered the story. I just gave it a balanced view." Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon. How can you be objective about Clinton?

MH: Objective journalism is why politics have been corrupt for so long? 

HST: If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don't quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.

MH: If you found yourself teaching a journalism course -- Dr. Thompson's Journalism 101 -- what would you tell students who were looking to go about covering stories? 

HST: You offering me a job? Shit. Well, I wouldn't do it, I guess. It's not important to me that I teach journalism classes.

MH: But if you did, what would your reading list be? 

HST: Oh, I'd start off with Henry Fielding. I would read writers. You know, I would read Conrad, Hemingway, people who use words. That's really what it's about. It's about using words to achieve an end. And the Book of Revelation. I still read the Book of Revelation when I need to get cranked up about language. I would teach Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times. All the journalists who are known, really, have been that way because they were subjective.

I think the trick is that you have to use words well enough so that these nickle-and-dimers who come around bitching about being objective or the advertisers don't like it are rendered helpless by the fact that it's good. That's the way people have triumphed over conventional wisdom in journalism. 

It was the relentless fail, fail, fail of your Mainstream Media, Mr. Koppel, more than any other factor, which left our democracy staked out like a goat at a watering hole, wide open to the predations of monsters like Rove and Limbaugh, DeLay and Coulter, Cheney and Hannity.  

Because, in the end, you and your colleagues were just too weak for the job, Mr. Koppel.  Just too bought-off. Just too compromised.  Just too busy fussing about Broderian manners and courtesies to notice that the Conservative barbarians were trashing the joint.

Frankly, we finally just got tired of waiting for your preening, "objective" colleagues to snap out of it and do their fucking jobs.  We stopped going along with the ridiculous, indefensible Beltway lies that the Right is no more irrational and reckless than the Left and that blame must always be allocated evenly across the ideological spectrum regardless of the facts.   

We stopped being patient because "patient" was getting us crushed.  We stopped being polite because Conservative thugs who hijacked the Party of Lincoln laughed at "polite" and then went right back to driving this country into a new dark age.
.

So it is true that we stopped timidly saying "please" and getting nothing  and started loudly saying "fuck" and getting results. it is also true that if you and your colleagues had  just bothered to do your damn job, we wouldn't have had to.