The single most toxic falsehood in American politics today is the Big Lie of Both Siderism. Like the Matrix, Big Lie of Both Siderism is everywhere, all around us, all the time. It is a prison for our minds which is constantly maintained and reinforced by a phalanx of (mostly) bland, middle-aged white men who are paid enormous sums of money to ritually repeat "Both Sides Do It" in every column they write for major American media corporations newspapers and magazines and into every microphone and teevee camera in front of which major American media corporations place them every fucking day.
Today's crime against journalism is brought to you by Ron Fournier, a Beltway toady so dedicated to his craft that, rumor has it, for a price, he'll perform at your kid's birthday as Betwixt, The Sad Centrist Clown who will sing melancholy songs about how everyone is equally to blame for everything...except the birthday boy, who is awesome!
This morning Squint and the Meat Puppet were paying Ron's tab, so today he sat at their table. And after their long daily colloquy about how sick, sick, sick Republican voters are of the leadership of the Republican Party and how Squint's informal assay of his Republican friends backs up his theory of the unstoppability of Donald Trump in the Republican primary race, Betwixt, The Centrist Clown stepped in to repeat his assertion that the Trump Behemoth is a sign of the anger of voters...
...in Both Parties.
I encourage everyone to take every opportunity to avoid watching Morning Joe, but if you are inclined to step into your HazMat suit and wade into the sludge, the wind up starts at around the 4:00 mark (a commercial will precede the video):
6 comments:
Can Trump's longevity have longer lasting appeal than the Select Benghazi Committee?
Can the Dr. Ben Carson overcome his faith healing to resume his scientific medical trained expertise and separate Trump from the front runner status?
Will there be an hostile takeover of Morning Joe by FOX and Friends? Has it transpired already without fanfare?
How long must we wait until Bush is provided his inevitable and entitlement of nominee?
What was the GOP doing.? What is the GOP doing? What will the GOP do in the future? What is the GOP thinking? What will the GOP think in the Future?
Coverage is already born out. 10 minutes of air time on GOP to 1 minute of Dem time. Fair and balance?
Like the GOP restates daily in progressive media, We just need to market our GOP word and the entire world will come to us.
You know what Americans need more of in their political coverage? More controversy more GOP ideas enumerated over and over against the progressive straw man. Because straw men do not talk back..........
Sorry, I can't watch Morning Joe or any of these TeeVee things. Gives me a terrible dose of Gurd. Reading snippets of the transcripts however makes me laff and laff and laff because they sound like they are all writing for The Onion. You'd think that the shear weight of the nonsense would sink ratings to the bottom and advertisers would flee post haste. But I guess not -- somebody watches this stuff and buys those products and services peddled on these shows.
Did Ron "Severe Dementia" Fournier blame Trump's popularity on Obama's failure to lead like a leaderly leader who leads the people he is the leader of?
I had a brief Twitter exchange a few weeks ago with Monsieur Fournier.
It was dawning on him that the two parties were BOTH messed up. He'd done this before and I had bearded him gently about it, but this time he came back at me when I tossed a stat at him. (and note his misspelling of the word bear as bare)
ME: @ron_fournier 54% of the party you say is only half the problem thinks Obama is Muslim. What myth do 54% of Dems believe in?
Fournier: when did I say "only half"? Never. What I do say -- b/c it's true -- is both of these rancid parties bare responsibility.
Me: you lay out a case that one side does this the other side does that -- you have split the blame in half.
Fournier: more than 60% percent of the nation's disapproves of both sides -- lowest ever for Rs AND Ds. It's not just me
Me: never said it was. again you're asserting that the two sides are equally degraded. it's just not true.
Fournier: never said equally. Both horribly degraded tho -- in minds of most Americans. You're arguing one is less horrible. Ok, you "win."
Me: just let the scales fall all the way away. the difference is a chasm, not a thin line.
That ended it, but it's clear that even though he admitted I had ``won'' and favorited my last tweet back at him, he still doesn't get it. I believe his credulousness is genuine and bespeaks a) low intellect and b) denial.
Ah yes, the wingnut myth of Obama being a
Double Seekrit Moozlim.
@ Unknown 1:34 - Ron "Severe Dementia/Keep Up The Fight" Fournier isn't sincerely concerned about the sad state of both parties. He's a poorly disguised water carrier for the elite GOP. He's on the same beat as David f'n Brooks, but he injects his mendacious poison into the political bloodstream different ways. Like Brooks, he may be occasionally embarrassed by the braindead idiocy of the Teabagger moron brigade, but that doesn't stop him from playing his assigned part in the puke funnel that is our "political media."
Mainly, he pushes the "Obama abandoned his promise to be bipartisan" and/or "Obama can't lead" nonsense in damn near every column/tweet he can, deliberately ignoring the GOP's very public, bragged-about-at-the-time campaign of reflexive, destructive obstructionism and pretending, dishonestly, that the GOP's tactics are no different from opposition parties of the past and it's Obama's unique weakness as a leader that is the main reason for the gridlock. Now that the Obama era is winding down, he's turned to Hillary and decided to pretend that her emails are the biggest political scandal in the history of the Republic, and disqualify her from the office she seeks. Meanwhile, the entire GOP field are running around flinging their own feces at each other when they're not eating it, and Ron barely bothers to even notice.
This narrative is the political journalism equivalent of pissing on us and saying it's a pure, cleansing rainfall, and he either damn well knows what he's doing and is doing it at the behest of his GOP buddies, or he has severe head trauma (hence my nickname for him). But I'll give Ron credit - he's quite skilled at deflecting and dissembling when called out on it on Twitter. He'd be a good GOP candidate for office with those skills.
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